Essential guides for content creators.
Get the most out of your Celtx setup. Celtx user guides provide complete feature details and step-by-step instructions for using the Celtx desktop software, online Celtx Studios, and Celtx Script mobile screenwriting app.
Mastering Celtx Buy
The official guide to Celtx. Teaches you how to use Celtx for writing scripts, creating storyboards, and improving workflow on any media project. Written by award-winning screenwriter Terry Borst.
Celtx: Open-Source Screenwriting Beginner's Guide Buy
An illustrative beginner's guide to writing and formatting professional scripts and screenplays using Celtx. Written by Ralph Roberts.
Choose wisely
Helpful reads for aspiring and accomplished media creators, curated and annotated by Celtx's resident writer, gamer and transmedia guru, Ryan FitzGerald.
Film and TV
The Guerilla Film Makers Handbook, by Chris Jones & Genevieve JolliffeBuy
With high-calibre tools and software available to anyone with a modest credit card and dreams of popcorn, the only thing missing is this book. The authors' hard-won lessons in this book were like drinking from a firehose.
Story, by Robert McKeeBuy
Tough to understate the value of this book. My personal moment was in reading McKee's lesson on subtext. Those few pages did more to elevate the quality of my writing than any dozen books that preceded it.
Crafty TV Writing: Thinking Inside the Box, by Alex EpsteinBuy
This was a classroom in a book. Epstein's articulate explanation of linking act-in and act-out moments now seems obvious but this was the first book that taught me to marry structure and strategy.
Digital and Interactive
Chris Crawford on Interactive StorytellingBuy
What McKee does for film, Crawford does for interactive media. Translating story into something that can be quantified and programmed without losing soul is what makes Crawford a master at looking under narrative's hood.
Digital Storytelling, by Carolyn Miller HandlerBuy
I read the first edition a few years ago. The first half was rudimentary -- "We used to tell stories around the fire..." type stuff. The second half was gold. This new second edition has a ton of contemporary material.
Comic Books
Panel One: Comic Book Scripts by Top Authors, edited by Nat GertlerBuy
This collection of sample scripts and reflections by their authors did a fantastic job at explaining how narrative happens *between* the panels instead of on the face of them.
Video Games
Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames, edited by Chris BatemanBuy
This high-level text on narrative from the IGDA is a necessary addition for any writer hoping to make the lateral move from linear to non-linear narrative, if only for a solid understanding of agency and affordances.
Professional Techniques for Video Game Writing, edited by Wendy DespainBuy
This second book on narrative by the IGDA shifts focus from writing to include a look at the life of the author and what a career in writing for games entails. There's a lot of meat on this bone.
Writing for Video Game Genres: from FPS to RPG, by Wendy DespainBuy
This third book by the IGDA is tactical, eschewing theory in favour of actually showing what game writing looks like. If the first books ask the question, "You ready?" then this book helps you prove it.
Second Person, edited by Pat Harrigan & Noah Wardrop-FruinBuy
Second Person is a must-read for writers in peril of losing their career to their biases. There is art and craft a-plenty in live cinema, interactive installations, tabletop RPGs and many other genres outside Hollywood.
(Bonus) Board Games
Tales of the Arabian Nights, by Z-Man GamesBuy
Based on the original tales, the goal of the game is to return to Baghdad with the best story. When friends want to play a story-based game, this is my go-to 90% of the time.
Android, by Fantasy Flight GamesBuy
Android is love-song to science fiction. This dense game has a number of competing narrative systems at play, inviting players to dig into a conspiracy, solve a murder or sabotage other players' attempts at redemption.