My favorite book of all time might be the non-fiction book We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families by Philip Gourevitch about the Rwandan genocide. But, when searching for screenwriting lessons, the most consistently interesting author for me is Michael Lewis. Moneyball, The Blind Side, Liar's Poker, The New New Thing, etc. They're all great reads with fascinating characters and great anecdotes. If I were to pick one book, I'd say Liar's Poker because it's the perfect marriage of characters and plot and has a great ending.

I like Cook, David "A History of Narrative Film" and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_film

Earlier in the year, I'm pretty sure Scott highlighted the NYT article about Lindsay Doran and her presentation on what makes films satisfying. That article mentions that she based her observations on the book “Flourish,” by Martin E. P. Seligman, and his work on the five essential elements of well-being. That put "Flourish" on my reading list. As far as I know, Doran doesn't have any books out on the topic (yet), but she did give a TEXxConejo2012 talk called Saving the World vs Kissing the Girl that may be worth adding to the non-book resource list, too.

What kind of non-fiction books are you all interested in to help you write drama? I admit I've been scratching my head a little, but realized for this genre, I'm drawn to books on psychology: both the psychology of how people behave, and how literature and film and storytelling works. How do we make people CARE about the characters and stories in drama? When we strip away the CGI, car chases, laughs, blood spatter, monsters...what does a drama need to do in order to sell tickets and keep people in their seats? To understand how stories work, I'd recommend the books of Joseph Campbell, starting with The Hero of a Thousand Faces and The Power of Myth. To understand how people work, a great book for writers (for understanding and troubleshooting your character relationships) is Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships by Eric Berne. I would also recommend reading (or reading up on) Abraham Maslow--I understand that his work has fallen out of vogue in academic psychology circles, but it remains a great conceptual framework for writers. Maslow's 1948 Psychological Review paper, A Theory of Human Motivation, is available for free online HERE (courtesy of York University). What about you? How can non-fiction books help you write drama? What kind of books and resources are you looking for here?

Games People Play is a great one. Whenever I'm struggling with dialogue scenes I always break the roles down and start thinking about games.

My feeling is that the broader the category is, the more difficult it is to think of relavant non-fiction books. Drama is pretty broad.

Cool! Hi, mrsmbarlow. Nice to meet someone else who has found the book helpful.

A recap of suggestions so far. (This is a plain text list, but Scott has the full list with embedded links.) Dramatic Non-Fiction We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families by Philip Gourevitch Michael Lewis (Moneyball, The Blind Side, Liar’s Poker, The New New Thing, etc.) Non-Fiction for Drama Writers Flourish by Martin E. P. Seligman Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships by Eric Berne The Hero of a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell A History of Narrative Film by David Cook History of Film [Wikipedia] The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell A Theory of Human Motivation (Psychological Review) by Abraham Maslow