Nick Bilton
Journalist, author and screenwriter
Where to hear and read about Nick Bilton1 episode or test
Nick Bilton is a journalist, author and screenwriter whose books include American Kingpin and Hatching Twitter. The thing most worth learning from him is to build true stories like screenplays: fix one theme before writing, make every character human, and report until each scene can be painted from concrete detail.
I won't start a book until I know what the theme is.
How to Improve Your Storytelling Skills (Nick Bilton Interview)
Nick Bilton: the story and the lessons
1Nick Bilton's path and the lessons that shaped him
Bilton never planned to write and treated the Times job as a ride. He describes the New York Times job as a Ferrari ride, because writing was never his plan.
That helped him beat self-doubt. His answer to it is 'it's just a bunch of words', and there is another piece tomorrow.
He nearly got fired twice at the Times. Once for saying he no longer read the print paper, and once for voicing a Zuckerberg opinion on CNN.
He wanted to swing a baseball bat at bad people until Gawker wrote about him weekly. Bill Keller had said journalists shouldn't write about others until they've been written about, and Bilton privately apologized to a couple of people. Early mistakes taught him restraint.
He picked a fight he could win, and won it. On David Carr's advice, Bilton took on the FAA's ban on Kindles and iPads during takeoff and landing. He tested devices at testing facilities and wrote columns for about two years until the rules changed.
Bezos thanked him by name on an earnings call.
A hit book made his next story harder to find. A screenwriter friend read American Kingpin and told him he'd never get a story this good again. His NRA book took two years of reporting, then stalled when COVID hit and the scoops surfaced in the Letitia James trial.
His mother taught him that stories hold even the hardest audiences. She taught rough kids in northern English prisons, and they listened when she explained Hamlet. She wrote 'never live without beautiful books' in a gift copy of War and Peace.
She read the last page of every book first because she could not stand the tension. Many books in his office were hers.
2How Bilton builds theme, structure and tension
Bilton fixes the theme in one sentence before he writes. He can pitch a 100,000-word book in one elevator ride, and every scene must loop back to that line like a braid. His Apple Vision Pro story was 'the future is coming whether we like it or not'.
His Elon Musk feature ran on one idea: Musk needs a problem to solve, and if none exists he creates one. The theme usually stays in his head rather than on the page.
He enters each scene late and leaves it early. He borrows the screenwriting rule: start mid-conversation and cut away before the question is answered, so the next scene supplies the answer.
His example is an old couple at dinner. He asks for the salt, and she answers with his doctor's warning about cholesterol, delivering exposition with no lecture scene. A screenplay page is about a minute of film, so every word must earn its place.
He ends short chapters on a question and answers it soon. American Kingpin has 58 short chapters, each built to make the reader want one more. A cliffhanger gives away enough to hook but not enough to reveal the outcome.
Answering it 200 pages later feels like a cheat. Hatching Twitter opens with Evan Williams vomiting into a bin before a speech to 300 employees, then jumps back and pays it off later.
He puts one character in the way of another's goal. Any story needs one character trying to do something and another standing in the way. That clash is where tension comes from.
'If I want to walk into the kitchen here and grab a water, that's not a very good story. If you're standing in between me with a knife, that's a great story.'
He slows the pace after a crescendo, like a pianist. Bilton plays classical piano and treats writing as music. After the intense library raid in American Kingpin, his publisher Nikki Papadopoulos asked him to slow down.
He added a calmer chapter in Korea following the seized laptop being built, from chips to assembly line to plane.
He tests book ideas as big stories about small things, or the reverse. He says there is no story in the middle. Tiger King uses a few exotic-cat collectors to tell the story of the American dream, and An Inconvenient Truth makes climate change personal.
The Silk Road, in his telling, is about a moment when anyone could build a world and become God in it, and the Twitter story is about the small people who built it and fought for control.
3How Bilton makes characters readable, even villains
A draft reader's 'I hate them all' sent Bilton to murder mysteries. A Stanford friend wrote it on page 160 of a printed draft of the Twitter book, and also wrote that he wasn't rooting for anyone. Bilton studied how mysteries keep readers close to killers.
His lesson: 'You can't hate the characters. You have to want to read them.'
He gives bad people ordinary, human moments. Murderers have mothers who love them, lose car keys and drop groceries. Ross Ulbricht was willing to have people killed, yet bought a flower for the woman at the flower stall.
Readers may not share the desire to kill, but they share those moments, and that lets them step into the character.
Bilton looks out with his characters, never down at them. He says the worst writers judge their characters. A writer must remove their own viewpoint and make people human, since even monsters need nuance.
He cites screenwriter Charles Randolph: 'you can't look down on your characters, you have to look out with them.'
He introduces characters one at a time. He copies film grammar: the main character comes first, and the next person arrives only when the reader is comfortable. In American Kingpin, Ross comes first, then his girlfriend Julia.
A stream of names sends readers flipping back or reaching for Kindle X-Ray. He calls knowing what the reader knows, and when to say more, his main strength.
He plants a repeated trait on each character. HSI agent Jared has a Rubik's Cube on his keychain, and the IRS agent reads every email three times. Readers think 'the Rubik's Cube guy' before they recall the name.
He adds these after drafting, partly to cut through the FBI, HSI, Secret Service and IRS acronyms.
He gets vivid traits from the people around his subject. FBI agent Tarbell kept asking 'would you rather' questions, and other agents asked Bilton if Tarbell had done it with him. People around Bezos always mention his loud, rolling laugh.
Subjects rarely mention these habits themselves, but they show the man, so Bilton keeps them.
4How Bilton reports: database, places and painted rooms
Bilton finishes reporting before he starts writing. At the Times, an editor's first question was whether you were done with your reporting. Bilton says you work out the story at the start, then write it.
'You don't write in the middle of your reporting.'
He built a timestamped database to reconstruct scenes he couldn't witness. Ulbricht saved two and a half years of chat logs as the Dread Pirate Roberts. Bilton loaded them with interviews, tweets, Facebook posts and Venmo records, and the timestamps began to line up.
He compares reporting to Tetris, with every source a piece that must fit. Ulbricht's mother spoke to him only on the courtroom steps, then declined to continue.
He visits the real places and finds locations himself. He ordered the same sushi in the same seat, which gave him wood chopsticks and a bathroom on the left in case a scene needed them.
To find an unlabelled campsite, he timed the drive from the Golden Gate Bridge at 48 minutes, searched every wooded area within that range on the map, and walked it.
He settles disputed memories against the record, or cuts them. Jack Dorsey remembered soup at Whole Foods in the rain, while Biz Stone remembered tea in the sun at the Japanese Tea Garden. Bilton checked the weather almanac to see which memory held up.
If he can't tell and it matters, he doesn't write it. Shirt color doesn't matter, so he picks one, but whether someone was shot in the head or the leg must be right.
He paints the room with a few concrete details. A Times colleague, barred by SEC rules from learning a banker deal, asked a source about the room. The lead had eight executives at a mahogany table on the 34th floor with the Statue of Liberty outside.
It read as if he had been there. Bilton says even if he knows everything, 'I want you to feel like you're there.'
He keeps two or three sensory details, and one is smell. He says writers over-describe and drift into purple prose, so he trims bloated scenes down to little seeds. Writers cover sight and sound and almost never smell.
He compares it to cartoons: the brain infers a lot from very little, as with Homer Simpson.
5Bilton's working habits, voice and endings
He drafts in jigsaw pieces and leans into his ADHD. He writes six paragraphs he can already picture, moves on when bored, then pastes the pieces into order. The hard part is forcing them together at the end.
His visual memory is vivid, down to the Ulbricht camping photos, but he forgets names, even one he typed a hundred times.
He has his drafts read aloud by text-to-speech. He pastes text into Speechify or ElevenLabs and listens, sometimes collaboratively. Hearing the pages exposes flaws.
Some screenwriting friends do the voices themselves, and he thinks in images, not words.
He treats every piece as disposable and keeps typing. He has written millions of words and forgets 90%, maybe 98%. David Carr's line was to keep typing until it turns into writing.
When his Kindle piece ran on Christmas Eve and drew an angry pro-Bezos crowd, his editor said to write another story tomorrow. Bilton says treating work as precious is what holds people up.
He never tells readers what to think of his subject. He presents the good, bad and ugly and lets readers decide. In American Kingpin he deliberately gave no verdict on Ross Ulbricht.
He is asked constantly whether Ulbricht deserved his sentence, and everyone answers differently.
He ends a piece by leaving the reader something to think about. He loves writing endings and sees them as a goodbye to the reader. His Musk feature closes on a former employee's question of whether a crazy person ever knows he is crazy.
The last line says Musk's most important mission may be never having to answer that. Nonfiction ends on the kicker, while fiction flips the order and opens with the striking image.
He says voice comes from reading, and a forced voice is weak. He cites Marquez, who held that nobody should start writing before reading 2,000 novels. He says sitting in an office with a book counts as working.
A voice is like a dog on a long leash: it always comes back. At magazines he adopts each house style, such as Vanity Fair's long paragraphs, and is hardly edited anymore.
How to Improve Your Storytelling Skills (Nick Bilton Interview)
Nick Bilton explains how screenwriting and murder mysteries taught him to make narrative nonfiction read like a movie, with tension, human characters and a theme fixed before he writes. The habit worth hearing is his obsessive reporting, where he builds a timestamped database and visits the real places so every scene can be painted from concrete detail.
Bilton never planned to write and treated the Times job as a ride. He describes the New York Times job as a Ferrari ride, because writing was never his plan.
That helped him beat self-doubt. His answer to it is 'it's just a bunch of words', and there is another piece tomorrow.
He nearly got fired twice at the Times. Once for saying he no longer read the print paper, and once for voicing a Zuckerberg opinion on CNN.
He wanted to swing a baseball bat at bad people until Gawker wrote about him weekly. Bill Keller had said journalists shouldn't write about others until they've been written about, and Bilton privately apologized to a couple of people. Early mistakes taught him restraint.
He picked a fight he could win, and won it. On David Carr's advice, Bilton took on the FAA's ban on Kindles and iPads during takeoff and landing. He tested devices at testing facilities and wrote columns for about two years until the rules changed.
Bezos thanked him by name on an earnings call.
A hit book made his next story harder to find. A screenwriter friend read American Kingpin and told him he'd never get a story this good again. His NRA book took two years of reporting, then stalled when COVID hit and the scoops surfaced in the Letitia James trial.
His mother taught him that stories hold even the hardest audiences. She taught rough kids in northern English prisons, and they listened when she explained Hamlet. She wrote 'never live without beautiful books' in a gift copy of War and Peace.
She read the last page of every book first because she could not stand the tension. Many books in his office were hers.
Bilton fixes the theme in one sentence before he writes. He can pitch a 100,000-word book in one elevator ride, and every scene must loop back to that line like a braid. His Apple Vision Pro story was 'the future is coming whether we like it or not'.
His Elon Musk feature ran on one idea: Musk needs a problem to solve, and if none exists he creates one. The theme usually stays in his head rather than on the page.
He enters each scene late and leaves it early. He borrows the screenwriting rule: start mid-conversation and cut away before the question is answered, so the next scene supplies the answer.
His example is an old couple at dinner. He asks for the salt, and she answers with his doctor's warning about cholesterol, delivering exposition with no lecture scene. A screenplay page is about a minute of film, so every word must earn its place.
He ends short chapters on a question and answers it soon. American Kingpin has 58 short chapters, each built to make the reader want one more. A cliffhanger gives away enough to hook but not enough to reveal the outcome.
Answering it 200 pages later feels like a cheat. Hatching Twitter opens with Evan Williams vomiting into a bin before a speech to 300 employees, then jumps back and pays it off later.
He puts one character in the way of another's goal. Any story needs one character trying to do something and another standing in the way. That clash is where tension comes from.
'If I want to walk into the kitchen here and grab a water, that's not a very good story. If you're standing in between me with a knife, that's a great story.'
He slows the pace after a crescendo, like a pianist. Bilton plays classical piano and treats writing as music. After the intense library raid in American Kingpin, his publisher Nikki Papadopoulos asked him to slow down.
He added a calmer chapter in Korea following the seized laptop being built, from chips to assembly line to plane.
He tests book ideas as big stories about small things, or the reverse. He says there is no story in the middle. Tiger King uses a few exotic-cat collectors to tell the story of the American dream, and An Inconvenient Truth makes climate change personal.
The Silk Road, in his telling, is about a moment when anyone could build a world and become God in it, and the Twitter story is about the small people who built it and fought for control.
A draft reader's 'I hate them all' sent Bilton to murder mysteries. A Stanford friend wrote it on page 160 of a printed draft of the Twitter book, and also wrote that he wasn't rooting for anyone. Bilton studied how mysteries keep readers close to killers.
His lesson: 'You can't hate the characters. You have to want to read them.'
He gives bad people ordinary, human moments. Murderers have mothers who love them, lose car keys and drop groceries. Ross Ulbricht was willing to have people killed, yet bought a flower for the woman at the flower stall.
Readers may not share the desire to kill, but they share those moments, and that lets them step into the character.
Bilton looks out with his characters, never down at them. He says the worst writers judge their characters. A writer must remove their own viewpoint and make people human, since even monsters need nuance.
He cites screenwriter Charles Randolph: 'you can't look down on your characters, you have to look out with them.'
He introduces characters one at a time. He copies film grammar: the main character comes first, and the next person arrives only when the reader is comfortable. In American Kingpin, Ross comes first, then his girlfriend Julia.
A stream of names sends readers flipping back or reaching for Kindle X-Ray. He calls knowing what the reader knows, and when to say more, his main strength.
He plants a repeated trait on each character. HSI agent Jared has a Rubik's Cube on his keychain, and the IRS agent reads every email three times. Readers think 'the Rubik's Cube guy' before they recall the name.
He adds these after drafting, partly to cut through the FBI, HSI, Secret Service and IRS acronyms.
He gets vivid traits from the people around his subject. FBI agent Tarbell kept asking 'would you rather' questions, and other agents asked Bilton if Tarbell had done it with him. People around Bezos always mention his loud, rolling laugh.
Subjects rarely mention these habits themselves, but they show the man, so Bilton keeps them.
Bilton finishes reporting before he starts writing. At the Times, an editor's first question was whether you were done with your reporting. Bilton says you work out the story at the start, then write it.
'You don't write in the middle of your reporting.'
He built a timestamped database to reconstruct scenes he couldn't witness. Ulbricht saved two and a half years of chat logs as the Dread Pirate Roberts. Bilton loaded them with interviews, tweets, Facebook posts and Venmo records, and the timestamps began to line up.
He compares reporting to Tetris, with every source a piece that must fit. Ulbricht's mother spoke to him only on the courtroom steps, then declined to continue.
He visits the real places and finds locations himself. He ordered the same sushi in the same seat, which gave him wood chopsticks and a bathroom on the left in case a scene needed them.
To find an unlabelled campsite, he timed the drive from the Golden Gate Bridge at 48 minutes, searched every wooded area within that range on the map, and walked it.
He settles disputed memories against the record, or cuts them. Jack Dorsey remembered soup at Whole Foods in the rain, while Biz Stone remembered tea in the sun at the Japanese Tea Garden. Bilton checked the weather almanac to see which memory held up.
If he can't tell and it matters, he doesn't write it. Shirt color doesn't matter, so he picks one, but whether someone was shot in the head or the leg must be right.
He paints the room with a few concrete details. A Times colleague, barred by SEC rules from learning a banker deal, asked a source about the room. The lead had eight executives at a mahogany table on the 34th floor with the Statue of Liberty outside.
It read as if he had been there. Bilton says even if he knows everything, 'I want you to feel like you're there.'
He keeps two or three sensory details, and one is smell. He says writers over-describe and drift into purple prose, so he trims bloated scenes down to little seeds. Writers cover sight and sound and almost never smell.
He compares it to cartoons: the brain infers a lot from very little, as with Homer Simpson.
He drafts in jigsaw pieces and leans into his ADHD. He writes six paragraphs he can already picture, moves on when bored, then pastes the pieces into order. The hard part is forcing them together at the end.
His visual memory is vivid, down to the Ulbricht camping photos, but he forgets names, even one he typed a hundred times.
He has his drafts read aloud by text-to-speech. He pastes text into Speechify or ElevenLabs and listens, sometimes collaboratively. Hearing the pages exposes flaws.
Some screenwriting friends do the voices themselves, and he thinks in images, not words.
He treats every piece as disposable and keeps typing. He has written millions of words and forgets 90%, maybe 98%. David Carr's line was to keep typing until it turns into writing.
When his Kindle piece ran on Christmas Eve and drew an angry pro-Bezos crowd, his editor said to write another story tomorrow. Bilton says treating work as precious is what holds people up.
He never tells readers what to think of his subject. He presents the good, bad and ugly and lets readers decide. In American Kingpin he deliberately gave no verdict on Ross Ulbricht.
He is asked constantly whether Ulbricht deserved his sentence, and everyone answers differently.
He ends a piece by leaving the reader something to think about. He loves writing endings and sees them as a goodbye to the reader. His Musk feature closes on a former employee's question of whether a crazy person ever knows he is crazy.
The last line says Musk's most important mission may be never having to answer that. Nonfiction ends on the kicker, while fiction flips the order and opens with the striking image.
He says voice comes from reading, and a forced voice is weak. He cites Marquez, who held that nobody should start writing before reading 2,000 novels. He says sitting in an office with a book counts as working.
A voice is like a dog on a long leash: it always comes back. At magazines he adopts each house style, such as Vanity Fair's long paragraphs, and is hardly edited anymore.