If the Form Fits: On “Faithful” Adaptations

I’m of the opinion that stories are greatly defined by their medium; how one tells a story affects the story itself. Some stories need a certain medium. Spider-Man into the Spider-Verse requires animation and specifically the types of animation the creators use. The same goes for Arcane, Nimona, Inside Out, and The Lion King. Those stories only truly work when they are animated. One does not simply turn the physical comedy of animated animals into CGI realism.

So, when stories are adapted between mediums, the story must change to suit its new medium, and if one is not willing to adapt the story to the new medium, they must choose the right one to begin with. What, then, does a faithful adaptation even look like?

Let’s focus on books, because that’s often what we think of when we think of adaptations. A book is written to be absorbed over time, picked up and put down—especially older books that would have been serialized or printed as a three-volume novel. Think Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. The written word is a unit of time. A story only happens as fast as you can read it.

Most mediums we adapt books to are not like that. Plays, films, and TV series all have certain time spans that everything must be compressed into because the commercial film and television industry demands certain standards, like what can air between commercials and what will make a profit in theaters. Stories on the page versus the screen are told in almost inverted languages: description, context, and thoughts versus sound, images, and dialogue. For example, we have different expectations for how book characters speak versus screen characters. Book characters can speak eloquently for pages without interruption and we’re often privy to their thoughts. But on a screen, we expect background chatter, overlap, sharp remarks and as much body language as verbal language.

The Lord of the Rings is an interesting case, specifically the second volume, The Two Towers. Tolkien wrote it in two separate parts: the first follows Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli, then the second rewinds to follow Frodo and Sam. The creators of the 2002 film adaptation, the second of a trilogy adapting the whole novel, decided to weave the two storylines together because commercial film demands a clear and familiar three-act structure. By cutting between the two stories, the film can tell both at once over the same three-act arc.

Novels are so hard to adapt into films precisely because page time is different from screen time. When you try to directly translate a book to film, you have something like Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels adapted into Gettysburg—an accurate adaptation, if four and a half hours long.

Novellas are easier to adapt accurately because they’re shorter than novels, so they fit better into a film’s standard runtime. Then you have Stephen King’s Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption and The Body adapted into the films The Shawshank Redemption and Stand by Me respectively. Or Norman Maclean’s A River Runs through It into the 1992 film of the same name. All three novellas are written in the first person, a technique which might seem uniquely suited to books, but the three films manage to weave the narration and the action together, using the narrative voice and the images the author created to tell the same story on the big screen.

So what to do with novels then? I argue that TV series have the runtime to accommodate the scale of a novel with the flexibility of different episode and season lengths. Whether a limited series for a standalone novel or multiple seasons for a book series, the extensive plots and many subplots of books are suited to the phased storytelling of television. Books are also often written with clear sequences that can translate well to episode arcs. Some stories that have taken advantage of TV include Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians which suffered from two film adaptations before finding new life on the small screen.

Another is Leigh Bardugo’s Shadow and Bone trilogy, which takes particular advantage of multi-plotline TV storytelling to combine Bardugo’s trilogy with her sequel duology Six of Crows. The TV series Shadow and Bone weaves together the plotlines of a whole cast of characters, and it is able to realize all of them and even add to the original story by creating something new. I think it shows the true power adaptations have and the freedom they gain when they treat their original work as a starting point instead of a limitation.

A faithful adaptation shouldn’t necessarily try to preserve the original story because the original already exists. A faithful adaptation should bring the story to life again. It should aim to convey and deliver across time and space the same themes, spirit, and impact of its original. It should be its own story, and not just an adaptation, because stories survive like everything else: through evolution.