Nick Bilton's Advice on Storytelling: Films, Journalism, and Murder Mysteries

Nick Bilton is a journalist, filmmaker, and author. He wrote Hatching Twitter, the inside story of Twitter's founding, and American Kingpin, the true crime account of Ross Ulbricht and the Silk Road. He directed the Netflix documentary series Cyn. He has been a reporter at the New York Times and a special correspondent at Vanity Fair. His books have sold hundreds of thousands of copies and been adapted for screen.

He thinks about writing the way a filmmaker thinks about scenes. Every chapter is a mini-movie. Every character gets both light and shadow. Every story needs a theme you can state in a single sentence.

Here are the key principles from his conversation on the How I Write podcast and his wider body of work.

1. Everything Is a Story. Everything.

"At the end of the day, everything is a story. Literally, there is nothing we do in life that is not a story. You go to the supermarket, it's a story being pitched to you to buy this cereal. You sit around with friends at dinner, you tell stories about the day. Politicians are telling a story."

Your job is not to find a story. Stories are everywhere. Your job is to figure out which story you are telling and how to tell it for your specific medium. What you take out matters as much as what you put in.

2. You Have to Create Drama and Tension from the Beginning

Bilton's first principle of structure is blunt: "You have to create drama and tension. Everything has to be tension from the beginning. Otherwise, why am I reading?"

He learned this from two unexpected sources. The first was screenwriting. The second was murder mysteries.

"With murder mysteries, there are things they do to really bring you into the story. You're on the edge of your seat because you're like, 'What would I do? How would I react?' Well, that's how American Kingpin reads."

In Hatching Twitter, the book opens with Evan Williams, the CEO of Twitter, throwing up into a garbage can after being fired. He wipes the vomit off his shirt and walks out in front of 300 employees to give a speech. Then the book cuts away to the beginning of the story. You spend the rest of the book wondering: how did we get there?

3. Know Your Theme Before You Write a Word

Bilton will not start writing until he knows the theme of the piece. Not the subject. Not the plot. The theme.

"I won't put a pen to paper until I know what it is. It's just in my head."

For his Vanity Fair cover story on Elon Musk, the theme was: he needs a problem to solve, and if there isn't one, he'll create one. For the Theranos story, the theme was: Silicon Valley's ethos of fake it till you make it, taken to a potentially deadly extreme. For the Apple Vision Pro piece, the theme was: the future is coming whether we like it or not.

Every detail in the story must connect back to the theme. "The circles always have to come back. If they don't, you've lost the reader."

4. Paint the Room

Bilton learned this from watching Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times. Sorkin was reporting on a helicopter crash involving bankers in a secret deal. The source could not reveal any details about the deal due to SEC rules. So Sorkin asked: "Just describe the boardroom to me."

"What does it look like? Mahogany desk. Were there croissants? Chocolate croissants. Was it carpeted or wood floor? Could you see the Statue of Liberty?"

The next day, the piece opened: "In a boardroom overlooking the Statue of Liberty on the 34th floor at a mahogany table, eight executives were negotiating a deal that would change their..." As so-and-so reached for a chocolate croissant.

Sorkin knew nothing about the deal. But the reader felt like he understood everything.

For American Kingpin, Bilton tracked down the campground where Ross Ulbricht went for a weekend by geolocating photos, calculating drive times from the Golden Gate Bridge, and then physically going there. He sat where they sat. He noted the smell of pine needles, the sound of crickets, the way the sky looked through the trees.

"You don't need a lot. Writers often overdescribe. All you need is two or three things. The smell of the pine needles and the smoke. The sound of the crickets. The way the sky looks with the trees. That's it."

The brain infers from a few details. Homer Simpson is barely drawn, and you love the guy.

5. Make Characters Human, Not Heroic or Villainous

"Ross Ulbricht was willing to have people potentially murdered to save his empire. But at the same time, he had this incredibly sweet side. He bought a flower for the woman who worked at the flower stall because he figured no one ever buys flowers for her."

Screenwriter Charles Randolph, who wrote The Big Short, told Bilton: "You can't look down on your characters. You have to look out with them." The moment you judge your characters from above, they stop feeling real.

After American Kingpin, the most common question Bilton gets is: "Did Ross deserve the sentence he got?" He deliberately left that question unanswered.

"The most important thing to me in writing is that you don't tell the reader what to think. You present them with the good and the bad and the ugly and let them decide."

6. Use Cliffhangers, But Keep Them Close

Bilton structures his books with short chapters and frequent cliffhangers. American Kingpin has chapters that read like bite-sized episodes, each ending with a question that pushes you into the next one.

"The goal was to make it so you read these little chapters and you're like, 'Just one more. I'll just do one more.'"

"If I say Ross has to decide if he's going to have people killed and then 200 pages later he decides, you're like, 'Wait, what?' You've got to make sure the pacing is right."

He describes assembling a book as playing Tetris. Pieces of reporting, interviews, social media posts, chat logs, photos - all of it goes into a database with timestamps. Then he starts fitting pieces together. "Oh, that piece can go here. And I got a line. Great. This one I'll put to the side for now."

7. Do the Reporting Before You Write

"When you're a reporter, you do your reporting. You don't write in the middle of it. You don't interview five people for a feature and then start writing and be like, 'Oh, I got to interview five more people.' You finish your reporting. Then you write."

For American Kingpin, he got access to Ross Ulbricht's laptop, which contained two and a half years of chat logs from the Silk Road. He built a database of chat logs, interviews, social media posts, tweets, Venmo accounts, photos with geolocations, and timestamps. He interviewed roommates, girlfriends, college friends, FBI agents.

Then he went to every location he could physically visit. The coffee shop where Ross worked. The library in Glen Park. The sushi place where Ross went with his girlfriend. He ordered the same food and sat in the same seat.

"I don't use all of it. I'm not describing what the sushi is. But I can say the chopsticks were wood, the bathroom was to the left, someone walked out of the back. I can describe all of these things if I need them."

8. The Magazine Feature Has Changed. Adapt.

"If you go back and pick up the New Yorker or Vanity Fair from 30 or 40 years ago, the lead of these stories was 800 words describing the scene. The reason was you had no idea what it looked like because there was no internet."

Today, everyone knows what everything looks like. You can Google it in 12 seconds. The 800-word scene-setting lead is dead.

The exception proves the rule. Bilton's Apple Vision Pro piece did describe the room in detail - because nobody had ever been inside Apple's secret hardware labs. When the information is genuinely exclusive, description works. Otherwise, find a more interesting way in.

For his Elon Musk profile, he opened not by describing SpaceX but by painting the room of Elon's mind. A cascade of missions, repeated with escalating absurdity, ending with: "But this year, Musk set off on the most difficult mission of all." What is it? Keep reading.

9. Your Voice Is a Dog on a Long Leash

"Your voice just becomes your voice. It's like a dog on a long leash. Eventually it comes back."

What prevents voice from showing up is fear. Doubt. The internal editor who says this isn't proper, this isn't serious, this isn't what a real writer sounds like.

Bilton never wanted to be a writer. He fell into journalism through a series of accidents. When he became a reporter at the New York Times, he thought someone would tap him on the shoulder and tell him to leave. "So for me it was always like I get to drive the Ferrari for a little while."

David Carr told him: "Keep typing until it turns into writing." Bilton has written millions of words over 20 years and does not remember 98% of them. "The thing that holds so many people up is they think it's this precious thing. It's not. It's just words and you're just telling a story."

10. Every Story Is Either Big About Something Small, or Small About Something Big

"There are two kinds of stories. There are big stories about something very small. And there are small stories about something much bigger. There is no story in the middle."

An Inconvenient Truth is a big story (climate change) made personal (what can I do?). Tiger King is a small story (exotic cat collectors) about something big (the American dream and business). American Kingpin is a small story (one man running a website from a library) about something big (anyone can create a world and become God in it, and that world can kill people).

Stories in the middle are forgettable. If you cannot tell which category your idea falls into, the idea is not ready.

The same principles that make a great movie scene make a great book chapter. The same eye for human contradiction that makes a compelling documentary subject makes a compelling character on the page.

For more on narrative nonfiction that reads like film, see David Grann on investigation as storytelling. And for the rhetorical techniques that make individual sentences memorable, read Mark Forsyth on the formulas everyone should know.

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