Nat Eliason's Advice on Writing: From Blog to Book and Everything He Learned

Nat Eliason built one of the most popular personal blogs on the internet, with millions of readers across hundreds of articles. He then wrote Crypto Confidential, a narrative nonfiction book about making and losing millions in crypto. He is now writing a science fiction novel. He studied philosophy at Carnegie Mellon. He has been a marketer, an entrepreneur, a crypto degen, and a book influencer with over 100,000 TikTok followers - a side quest he eventually quit because it was eating the writing.

His writing advice comes from David Perell's How I Write podcast and his newsletter on writing craft.

Develop Taste Before Technique

Eliason's first principle: you have to know what good writing looks like before you can produce it. This requires reading broadly - not just great books, but bad ones too. Stephen King says the same thing. "You need to read bad books because once you read something you think isn't good, you then have to articulate what's not good about this."

The value is diagnostic. Once you can name what fails in a bad book, you can name what works in a good one. "Oh, he does this thing really, really well, and I really, really like that." You develop a vocabulary for craft. Without that vocabulary, improvement is guesswork.

Eliason's formative influence was David Foster Wallace. Not just the prose style but the emotional depth. "Very clear that he wrote Infinite Jest to try to write something that was good enough to him, and he failed." One of the main characters is horribly suicidal because he never thinks his work is good enough. "That's ultimately what happened with him." The taste gap, taken to its darkest extreme.

The Taste Gap

Ira Glass's concept, and Eliason returns to it constantly. You know good work when you see it. You cannot yet produce it. The distance between recognition and execution is the taste gap, and it is agonizing.

"The really interesting thing is that you never fully close that gap, and to some degree you don't want to. Because once you feel like you've closed that gap, you stop learning." But leave it open too long and it destroys you.

Eliason's approach: "It's good and it can be better." A yes-and instead of a verdict. He reads his draft, identifies what feels off, then goes looking for writers who do that specific thing well. When his sci-fi novel's first draft had too much action and not enough interiority, he stopped reading Blake Crouch and started reading Steinbeck. "If I can prime myself with those kinds of books, then when I go back and edit this, I can draw it out a little bit more."

He compares this to a study on orphaned toddlers. Given a range of foods without interference, they naturally gravitated toward whatever addressed their nutritional deficiency. "I feel like there's a little bit of that with reading and writing." You know something is missing. You sample widely. You recognize the thing that has what you lack.

Too Much Editing Removes Your Style

"People hire so much editing help. I think it's a big mistake. What it's doing is it's removing your style." Eliason calls this the Grammarly problem. Over-editing homogenizes prose. The quirks that make your writing yours get sanded away in the name of correctness.

This does not mean skipping revision. It means knowing the difference between editing for clarity and editing for conformity. A sentence that breaks a grammar rule but sounds like you is worth more than a grammatically perfect sentence that sounds like everyone else.

The implication: be careful who you let edit your work, and be careful how much you let them change. An editor who strengthens your voice is invaluable. An editor who replaces it with generic competence is dangerous.

Promise, Progress, Payoff

Eliason's checklist for storytelling, distilled: every story needs a promise (what is at stake), progress (the reader sees movement), and payoff (the resolution delivers on the promise). "Once you hear this, you're never going to be able to unhear it, and you're going to notice it in everything you read and everything you watch."

He adds the yes-but/no-and structure for scene transitions. A character gets what they wanted, but there is an unseen consequence. Or they do not get it, and something worse happens. "Usually the character is getting further and further away from their goal as the story goes on." The stakes escalate. The reader stays.

His example of dead dialogue versus alive dialogue: if two characters simply agree, nothing happens. If one says something unexpected - a redirection, a non-verbal response, a walk-out - the reader's brain generates a dozen questions. "That creates a whole new level of intrigue."

The Blog-to-Book Pipeline

Going from internet writing to a book nearly broke Eliason. "Not only was I working on this in the dark, I was doing something in a completely new style I had never done before."

The specific pain: no feedback. Online writing produces immediate response. Tweets, comments, shares. A newsletter sits in the drafts folder for two weeks at most. A book sits for two years. "Sitting down to work on this for three, four hours a day, feeling like it's bad and not really having anyone to look at it."

It got so bad that he finally sent two chapters to his editor and said: "Tell me if I'm on the right track." The editor said yes. "I didn't realize how much I had been holding on to by not asking for feedback. I think I wasn't asking because I was scared."

After finishing his first draft, he needed the dopamine so badly that he built a writing tracking app - a Strava for words. Log your sessions. See what your friends wrote. Get a social win for writing today without having to publish anything. "It sounds almost embarrassing and stupid for me to say this, but having a little app where I can show the world that I wrote today without having to publish anything - it makes a difference. We are monkeys after all."

Kill the Side Quest

Eliason built a massive BookTok following in six weeks. 50,000 followers. Eventually over 100,000 on TikTok, nearly 180,000 on Instagram. Great for promoting the book. Terrible for writing the next one.

Over Thanksgiving, his family was in town, his daughter was off from preschool, and the small window of writing time he had went to TikToks instead of the sci-fi draft. "Wait, this is completely messed up. This is not what I should be spending that time on."

He quit entirely. "The number one way you fail at writing is to stop writing." The BookTok audience was a side quest. The writing was the main quest. "It would be pretty easy for me to just go off on this side quest of book influencer when really I want to be the one writing the books."

Dialogue That Moves

Every scene is about intention and obstacle - what does the character want, and what stands in their way? Eliason credits Aaron Sorkin: "I worship at the altar of intention and obstacle."

His practical rules for dialogue: it must advance the conflict. Eighty percent of real conversation would be dead on the page. "The main difference between exciting dialogue and dead dialogue is how directly it relates to whatever problem is at hand." Every exchange should have some element of tension, even between friends.

Three techniques that keep dialogue alive: redirection (the response goes somewhere the reader did not expect), non-verbal response (one character simply gets up and leaves), and the yes-but/no-and transition (the scene ends with new stakes, not resolution).

Key Takeaways

• Read bad books. They teach you to articulate what good writing does that bad writing does not.
• The taste gap is permanent. The healthy version is "it's good and it can be better."
• Be careful with editing. Too much removes your style. Protect your quirks.
• Every story needs promise, progress, and payoff. Every scene needs intention and obstacle.
• The transition from blog to book is brutal. Ask for feedback before the silence crushes you.
• Kill side quests that eat writing time. The number one way to fail is to stop writing.

Eliason's warning about over-editing - the Grammarly problem - is exactly why Athens shows you every suggested change as a visible diff. You see what the AI wants to cut, rephrase, or tighten. You keep what sounds like you. You reject what does not. Your voice stays intact.

This post draws from Eliason's appearance on How I Write and his newsletter. For more on building an audience through writing, see David Perell's writing advice and Ben Thompson's writing advice.