What goes into adapting creative material from one medium to another? More than many stories often receive. Christopher discusses his thoughts on adaptations and what’s required during the panel “Stories That Stay with You” during Dragonsteel Nexus 2025. This one is certainly a timely topic.
A transcript follows for those of you who enjoy a good read:
Christopher Paolini:
At least for me, when you’re writing or building a story, you go through this elaborate—it’s almost like Markov Chain, you’re going through this entire sequence of decisions, right? If this, then that. If this, then that. I could do this, I could do that. If I do this, then I must do this or that. So you—and you do this sometimes for years on a certain story, and you build this ediface, essentially. And then, if someone’s adapting it, they come in, and they’re looking at the story as a finished product. And now a) they probably have to change it, to adapt it to make it fit for another medium. But they haven’t gone through that whole decision tree that you went through in order to create the original story. And so unless they’re willing to put in serious work over a very long time to understand why things were done—
Ryan Cahill:
Why those decisions were made.
Christopher:
Yeah, yeah. It’s very easy to say, “Well, we’ll change this. Or we’ll change that.” Without necessarily realizing the downstream consequences—
Ryan:
What if the dragon was green? It’s like, you know her name, right?
Christopher:
Yeah, yeah.
(audience laughs)
Christopher continued:
Well, and like The Wheel of Time show. I mean, or . . . we can think of lots of examples where they changed something early on because . . . whatever Hollywood reason, and then the flavor of the project just completely diverges from the original material which, you know, could be a good thing, could be a bad thing. But most times it’s not what people want.
Ryan:
But that is definitely a way to make a story stay with you.
(laughter)
Thoughts on Adaptations1
