Austin Grossman Quotes

I don't know how video game narrative works.

Games are advancing in terms of storytelling and trying to create a character, and it's a brand new audience for me.

The video game market is huge, and the ability to tell stories, and tell different kinds of stories in the gaming space is quickly evolving and changing for the better.

By the time I wrote 'Any Given Sunday' or 'Bats,' I sort of knew what my job was in terms of what a writer of dialogue does.

When you're writing for a show, you're writing part of the script. You have to tell the story.

Honestly, the life of a serial character on television, I'd love to write an essay about it.

I have no problems or issues with screenwriting in general.

I think that it's fun to get the script and open it like a Christmas present. That's 'Alcatraz' or anything that I'm working on. If the groundwork has been laid too much, the surprises aren't there.

If I ever wrote a script myself, it would be strongly emotional material.

Only in very rare circumstances will you see something cut out of my first drafts. Maybe it's because of the way I write. I'm very focused on the logical progression of the story, and every character has a role to play.

Writing a great script - not just a good one, but a great one - is almost an impossible task.

We start with strong characters and build the movie from there. That not to say we don't struggle with story - that's the most challenging part.

The few times I've tried to write original screenplays, it's a difficult process because I just don't feel like I know the characters the way I know them after the year or two it takes to write a novel.

But what I did think would be interesting is if we created a fictitious story of our own, and then took these stories that we had collected and assigned them to characters who would be played by actors.

I envision the script as a story in my mind, memorize the entire thing and have it play out. It helps me figure out where my character needs to go.

Well, I must tell you I write the scripts very close to the bone. So I'm writing episode seven now and couldn't tell you what happens in episode eight.

One of the reasons I started working at 'South Park,' actually, was that I wanted to learn how to structure things and how to tell a story.

Every book has got its challenges. You run into a plot point that you can't figure out, or a scene that you struggle to write and have to write 50 times.

The thing about games is, players often say they don't care about story, but then if you took the story out, what would their reaction be? If no one cared about story, we'd all still be playing Pac-Man. There's nothing wrong with Pac-Man, but the point is, there's a genre of games in which you want to become part of that world.

Somebody wrote a script around us, but Dustin Abraham came with the best one.

A lot of the time in animation is spent getting the story right - that's something you can't rush.

I actually enjoy writing longer books because you have even more to get your storytelling teeth into.

If you have a great script and great dialogue, you don't need to improvise.

It's a great luxury to have the writer with you on a new play because you can write and re-write, just trying to get the arc of the story, of their relationship right.

If you don't spend the time you need on developing characters and finding stories, complicated stories, the audience gets tired because they think they're seeing the same thing again and again.