What Writing for Top YouTubers Taught George Blackman About Storytelling

George Blackman has written scripts behind more than 60 million YouTube views — for creators including Ali Abdaal and MrBeast collaborator Mike Shake — and he’s the first to tell you that number needs context. But the insight he’s extracted from that work? That’s real, and it’s worth unpacking.

In this episode of Vidpros Insiders, George breaks down how he thinks about retention, structure, and the role AI actually plays in modern scriptwriting — without pretending any of it is magic.

From Gaming Channel to Ghost-Writing for YouTube’s Biggest Creators

George’s YouTube story starts where a lot of creator stories do: a teenage gaming channel. He was 14 or 15, playing Uncharted 3 online multiplayer, monetized enough to feel the possibility — and then had to shut it down to focus on exams. That early brush with “you can actually make money doing this online” planted something, even if it sat dormant for years.

The real turning point came when he was 22 or 23, working a completely unrelated job in London, and saw Ali Abdaal hiring. George applied, got one of the four writer roles, and spent about a year working inside that business before going freelance.

“I was one of the people who scripted one of his how much money I made videos and you just start to think like, ‘Wow, okay, there are so many avenues to monetize this kind of thing.'”

That experience did something most creators miss when they look at big channels from the outside: it revealed that top YouTubers aren’t solo operators. They’re businesses with teams, systems, and specialists. Working inside that machine — scripting the revenue breakdowns, collaborating with editors, sitting inside the actual content production pipeline — was a crash course in how YouTube at scale actually functions.

After Ali Abdaal, George went freelance as a scriptwriter. He’s honest about what that phase looked like: he hit a ceiling pretty quickly. When your output is capped by how many scripts you can write in a week without compromising quality, growth stalls. He tried building an agency to scale beyond that ceiling — and by his own admission, it “grew and died very quickly.” Now he’s shifted almost entirely into teaching and building a dedicated AI-powered scriptwriting tool.

The Retention Framework Behind Every Segment

Here’s the structural engine George has distilled from years of client work. He calls it a per-segment framework — a segment being any subtopic or chunk within a video — and it runs on three beats:

• Setup: Before you deliver any information, you imbue the next 30 to 60 seconds with stakes. Give the viewer a reason to care about what’s coming. Don’t assume they’ll naturally want to know — tell them why it matters.
• Tension: Gradually reveal the information the viewer needs. This isn’t about being withholding or artificially dramatic. It’s about pacing the reveal so the viewer is tracking with you rather than feeling dumped on.
• Payoff: Not a big climactic moment — just a moment of clarity. The viewer feels their understanding has moved forward. Then you immediately move into the setup for the next segment.

What makes this framework practically useful is that it translates directly into retention analysis. When George looks at a retention graph and sees a dip, he goes straight back to this structure: Was the setup weak? Did we fail to communicate why the next section mattered? Did the previous segment’s payoff fall flat, killing the momentum going into the next part?

This isn’t a formula in the creative-writing-book sense. It’s diagnostic. It gives you a concrete place to look when something isn’t working, rather than vaguely concluding “the video wasn’t engaging enough.”

Education vs. Entertainment: Not the Same Problem

George is careful to distinguish between educational and entertainment content, because the structural approach isn’t identical across both. Educational content has more natural momentum from the topic itself — viewers showed up to learn something specific. Entertainment-first content puts more weight on the emotional and narrative beats doing the heavy lifting.

The setup-tension-payoff loop applies to both, but the execution looks different. For educational creators, the setup is often a problem statement or a knowledge gap. For entertainment-focused channels, the setup is more likely an emotional hook or a curiosity trigger. Understanding which mode your video is in matters before you start scripting.

The Actual Problem With AI in Scriptwriting

George isn’t anti-AI. He’s building an AI tool. But he has a clear-eyed view of where AI scriptwriting goes wrong — and it’s less about the technology and more about how creators use it as a shortcut to avoid thinking.

“I think giving it a one-word prompt and saying, ‘I’m a YouTuber who does this. I want to write a script about this. Here are three scripts that I like from YouTubers in my niche. Write me a script’ — I think that’s pointless, it’s soulless, it risks plagiarizing, and what is the joy to be gained from that?”

The model he actually advocates for is using AI as a structural partner, not a content generator. Get the skeleton down with AI — the segment order, the arc, the logical flow. Then write the actual language yourself. In his framing: use AI to build the structure, but make sure it’s you “skinning the skeleton at the end.”

He’s also honest about the cognitive risk. He talks about how easy it’s become to outsource tasks his brain used to handle — scanning a long document for information is now something he reflexively wants to hand to Claude rather than doing himself. That kind of outsourcing has a cost: it erodes the judgment and instincts that make the AI outputs useful in the first place. If you’re not doing the thinking, you lose the ability to evaluate what AI produces.

This is the tension at the center of his teaching work. He’s not trying to tell people to avoid AI. He’s trying to help them use it in a way that doesn’t hollow out the thing that makes their content worth watching.

Writing in Someone Else’s Voice — and Then Finding Your Own

One skill that gets overlooked when people talk about ghostwriting is the actual challenge of it: you’re not supposed to sound like yourself. George spent years writing scripts where the job was to disappear. That meant watching hours of a client’s content, internalizing how they think, and being able to hear their voice in his head before writing a single word.

He describes this as a distinct skill — separate from writing itself. It’s closer to character work. You’re not just matching vocabulary or cadence. You’re trying to model how a specific person would arrive at a point, what they’d find funny, where they’d push back on conventional wisdom.

The inverse challenge — finding and keeping your own voice when you’ve spent years disappearing into other people’s — is something George acknowledges he came to late. He started using YouTube as a funnel for his own business roughly four years later than he thinks he should have. That delay is its own lesson: the skills you develop for hire don’t automatically translate into building something for yourself. You have to make the deliberate choice to show up as you.

Script vs. Edit: Two Sides of the Same Coin

George was asked directly: if you had to choose, is scriptwriting more important than editing for retention? His answer was a firm refusal to choose.

In his experience working in larger teams, he’s always worked most closely with the editor. And the best results — the work he’s proudest of — came from collaborations where the editor understood the script’s intent without needing it spelled out. Where the editor could say, “I see what you’re going for, and here’s how I’d change the script so I can edit it this way.”

That’s a symbiotic relationship, not a hierarchy. Script sets the bones. Edit gives it muscle and skin. Pull either one out of alignment and you feel it in the retention graph.

The framing that rang true across the conversation: for a podcast, script carries more weight. For a highly visual video, editing does more lifting. For storytelling content — vlogs, talking-head essays, explainers — neither can compensate for the other. Both have to be operating at the same level.

What’s Coming: An AI Tool Built Around Judgment, Not Automation

George is currently building a dedicated scriptwriting application — not a generic AI wrapper, but a tool designed around the specific workflows and structural approaches he’s developed over years of client work and teaching. The waitlist is live at georgeblackman.link/app.

The philosophy behind it reflects everything he said in this conversation: AI handles the repeatable structural work, and the human brings judgment, originality, and voice. The tool isn’t designed to write scripts for you. It’s designed to help you write better ones, faster, without trading away the things that make your content yours.

His broader point — the one worth sitting with if you’re a creator trying to figure out where to put your energy — is that the creators who win in an AI-saturated environment won’t be the ones who use the most AI. They’ll be the ones who combine AI with real storytelling instincts and enough judgment to know when the output is good and when it’s missing the point.

That’s a skill you build by doing the work, not by offloading it.