A standing column
The Adaptation Lens
Adaptation is not translation but interpretation. When a story changes format — page to screen, novel to podcast, prose to playable world — it is forced to declare what it cannot live without. Studying that crossing is how we find the irreducible core of narrative itself.
A novel hands you interiority for free; a film must build it from glances and weather. A podcast cannot show you a face, so it learns to make a voice do the work of a whole body. A game refuses to let you watch from a safe distance and dares you to be responsible for the outcome. None of these is the "real" version. Each is a different instrument tuned to the same melody — and the gaps between them are where the most interesting criticism lives.
The three essays below approach that gap from different doors: one reads a single story across formats, one watches editors and directors make the brutal choices adaptation demands, and one argues that interactive narrative has quietly become literature. Read together, they are a single inquiry into what stays constant when everything else is allowed to change.
Three Essays
The Art of Reading Across Formats
Why the same story hits differently in print, film, and audio — and what each medium can and cannot carry.
How Literary Fiction Gets Adapted
The decisions that make or break a novel on screen, and why fidelity is the wrong question to ask.
Narrative Games Are Literature Now
Why the critical establishment has been slow to accept interactive storytelling as a serious literary form.