Best Play & Scriptwriting Writing Reference Books of 2025

The Emotion Thesaurus (Second Edition) is an essential reference guide for writers seeking to create more personalized and evocative character expressions. This book is packed with body language cues, thoughts, and visceral responses for 130 emotions, providing limitless options for individualizing a character's reactions. The authors, Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi, also offer advice on overcoming the biggest emotion-related writing problems, and how to show hidden feelings and emotional subtext through dialogue and nonverbal cues. This book is a must-have for writers seeking to improve their craft and create more emotionally engaging stories.

The Save the Cat! Beat Sheet Workbook is an interactive guide that helps writers turn their ideas into compelling stories. This book provides key writing prompts and asks all the important questions to guide writers through the Save the Cat! process. It offers exercises and prompts to help writers unlock their idea engine, identify story genres, create fully developed characters, and more. The workbook is inspiring, easy to manage, and a valuable tool for both professional and novice writers. Overall, this book is a playful and fun way to make the screenwriting process more manageable and enjoyable.

The Conflict Thesaurus: A Writer's Guide to Obstacles, Adversaries, and Inner Struggles (Volume 2) is an excellent resource for writers looking to create engaging and dynamic stories. The book provides over 100 tension-inducing scenarios that challenge characters both internally and externally, ensuring that the story is not predictable. It also offers guidance on using conflict to deepen the story, create epic adversarial showdowns, and give characters agency. The book is a must-have for any author looking to add depth and complexity to their work.

The Emotional Wound Thesaurus is a must-have resource for writers who want to create realistic and compelling characters. This book provides a database of traumatic situations and their impacts, including fears, lies, personality shifts, and dysfunctional behaviors. It also offers techniques on how to show the past experience to readers in an engaging way. With over 100 entries packed with information, this book is a crash course in psychology for creating characters that feel incredibly real to readers. Overall, The Emotional Wound Thesaurus is an essential tool for any writer who wants to add depth and authenticity to their characters.

The Screenplay Outline Workbook is a comprehensive guide for turning your movie ideas into a finished screenplay. This book offers a manageable set of tools, steps, and exercises to help you create a strong plan and map out your story. With 30+ tools, exercises, and prompts, this workbook will not only help you generate new story ideas but also build a sturdy foundation for your screenplay. The author provides enough instruction and theory to guide you through the process without overwhelming you. This book is an excellent resource for both beginner and experienced screenwriters who want to hone their skills and write their best screenplay.

The Secrets to Creating Character Arcs is a must-read for any fiction writer seeking to master character creation. This book offers valuable insights into what makes characters memorable and how to make them compelling. The author shares ten simple tricks to add excitement to your plot without deviating from the main story, and explains how to take advantage of plot and structure to develop your protagonist's journey. The book also covers the worst thing a writer can do for their character and how to make readers relate to unlikable characters. Overall, this book is an excellent resource for writers who want to create unforgettable characters that will keep readers engaged long after they've finished the book.

The Negative Trait Thesaurus is a must-have resource for writers who want to create deep, realistic characters. Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi have crafted a flaw-centric exploration of character development, including character arc, motivation, emotional wounds, and basic needs. This book offers a vast collection of flaws to help writers explore the possible causes, attitudes, behaviors, thoughts, and emotions behind their characters’ weaknesses. In addition, it includes common characterization pitfalls and methods to avoid them, as well as downloadable tools to aid in character creation. This book is an invaluable resource for writers who want to craft likable, interesting characters.

The Positive Trait Thesaurus: A Writer's Guide to Character Attributes is a comprehensive resource for writers struggling with character creation. The book offers a wide selection of positive attributes to choose from, along with possible causes for why a trait might emerge, associated attitudes, behaviors, thoughts, and emotions. It also provides real character examples from literature, film, or television to show how an attribute drives actions and decisions, influences goals, and steers relationships. The author offers advice on using positive traits to hook readers while avoiding common personality pitfalls. Overall, this is an invaluable tool for writers seeking to develop dynamic, one-of-a-kind characters that readers will love.

The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr is a compelling and groundbreaking guide to creative writing that reveals how the brain responds to storytelling. Storr applies dazzling psychological research and cutting-edge neuroscience to our myths and archetypes to show how we can write better stories. The author's choice of examples ranges from Harry Potter to Jane Austen to Alice Walker, Greek drama to Russian novels to Native American folk tales, King Lear to Breaking Bad to children’s stories. This book is destined to become an invaluable resource for writers of all stripes, whether novelist, screenwriter, playwright, children’s writer, or writer of creative or traditional nonfiction.

The Rural Setting Thesaurus, part of the Writers Helping Writers series, is a comprehensive guide for writers looking to create vivid and impactful settings in their work. With over 100 settings listed, the book offers sensory details, possible sources of conflict, and advice on building mood and symbolism. The authors also delve into the challenges of writing effective descriptions and provide special considerations for rural and personal settings. This book is an invaluable tool for any writer looking to improve their craft and create immersive worlds for their readers.