NEW YORK — Christopher Paolini was famously young, 19, when Random House published the first novel in his blockbuster Inheritance series, about a teenager named Eragon and his dragon, Saphira; his parents co-signed the contract. He was 28 by the time he finished the series, and still lived with his parents. (You could also say his parents lived with him, he quipped to a journalist at the time.) To celebrate, he treated himself to a custom broadsword from a shop in New York, where he’d temporarily lived during the summer of 2011 to buckle down on writing.
We met up when he returned to New York this fall to attend Comic Con. “It’s more fragrant now than when I was living here,” he said, catching a whiff of weed as we walked the few short blocks between Central Park and the Random House offices.
Paolini is now 40 and married, raising two young children in Paradise Valley, Mont., where he grew up. For the first time in more than a decade, he’s published a novel set in Alagaësia, the world of the Inheritance series: “Murtagh,” a 700-page book about (and titled after) Eragon’s half brother, an antihero with a traumatic childhood and his own dragon, Thorn.
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“There are so many grown-ups who are going to be so excited to read this book. This was part of their formative years,” said Michelle Frey, who has been Paolini’s editor from the start. The grown-ups I talked to in the overflowing line at Paolini’s Comic Con signing bore that out: They brought their decades-old copies, one of them stained with their mom’s coffee and then carefully dried over a radiator; another rescued, miraculously intact, from a childhood home that caught on fire.
“Eragon,” Frey said, “still sells and sells and sells”; the publisher is issuing a 20th-anniversary illustrated edition, its text arranged in columns “like a Bible,” Paolini joked.
When I asked Paolini what he noticed about his writing then as compared with his writing now, he said, “Well — I mean, how long do you have?” It soon became clear that this was his stock phrase for when a question was too broad. A steely “Great question! No comment” was his go-to response for a question he deemed too personal, like “When did you and your wife meet?”
Paolini was much more comfortable talking about his origin story: the idyllic childhood on the banks of the Yellowstone River, being home-schooled and largely encouraged to pursue his own interests. “My sister and I were just little barbarians, running out among the trees and the grass and the animals, building forts and climbing trees.” He finished his high school coursework by 15 and, with a couple of years to kill — not yet feeling ready for college — he decided to write a fantasy novel. His parents, who were self-employed for much of his childhood, were impressed enough by the resulting manuscript that they suggested self-publishing it. “I can always go to college in another year or two,” he thought to himself. “I can’t publish this book, at this current age, ever again. So let’s give it a shot.”
The family could afford to print only 50 copies in the first run. Paolini describes this period, his late teens, as “insanely stressful.” The family was at risk of losing their house if “Eragon” didn’t sell enough to turn a profit, and Paolini’s journals from the time were filled with entries worrying about money. To promote the novel, he stood by the front door of bookstores throughout the region, dressed in medieval costume and talking to every customer who walked in. On his very best day, he sold 42 books, an impressive number but not enough to consistently cover the costs of printing, gas and motel rooms.
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He got traction when he started cold-calling school librarians, offering himself as a guest speaker. Once the family started taking preorders for these events, they started averaging 300 sales a day. “And those are good numbers,” Paolini said. One of those copies wound up in the hands of author Carl Hiaasen while his family was vacationing in Livingston, Mont.; his young stepson was so absorbed in the book that Hiaasen then passed it on to Frey.
The advance from the three-book Random House deal “was terribly exciting and certainly relieved the immediate financial pressure,” Paolini said, but it created another kind of pressure: “I’m still on the hook for two more books,” he remembers thinking. “Eragon” wound up selling a million copies within six months, according to Publishers Weekly, and its sequel, “Eldest,” became the fastest-selling book in the history of Random House Children’s Books at the time. What was intended to be a trilogy stretched into a quartet. The source of stress quickly shifted from basic economic viability to reader expectations.
He struggled with “Inheritance,” the final book. “There were times in my life growing up where I did not know what year it was,” he said. “I wasn’t going to school. I was outside every day. I often would go months without going into town. So that was sort of a big shift, learning to deal with deadlines.” Progress on the manuscript was so painful that eventually, Frey said, “we kidnapped him and brought him to New York.”
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“I’m probably one of the only authors that knows what Random House looks like at 1 or 2 in the morning,” Paolini said. He spent all kinds of hours there, in a space set aside for him to write; one late night, his sister kept him company, startling a cleaner who discovered her, asleep, under a conference table. On weekends, Frey, who lived 10 blocks from where Paolini was staying, would pick up turkey meatballs at Fairway and bring them to his place, where they’d work all day.
When the Inheritance cycle was complete, Paolini was eager to have a more normal life, “getting to go out with friends, take time off. Date.” He swore off writing on contract. For his next project, a sci-fi novel called “To Sleep in a Sea of Stars,” he had time to lose himself in research, figuring out how he wanted interstellar travel to work; he even wrote a fake white paper about its technicalities.
Between work and his free time, he spends countless hours in his imagined worlds, in one form or another — if not writing, then creating art related to the books. In the middle of a discussion of video games, he takes out his phone and plays an entire YouTube walk-through of something he built in Minecraft. “Keep watching,” he insists, and it’s unclear whether this is a new-parent reflex — please play with this screen, so I can read the menu in peace — or pure, amply proven faith that his creations draw everyone in.
Dragons, and now the Fractalverse, remain a family enterprise. His sister is helping adapt a screen adaptation of his sci-fi series, his mother handles fan mail, and his father manages the business. After all these years, their website still has an appealingly DIY feel, selling a range of merch from stickers and autographed art prints to jewelry and baby onesies.
And these days, with the pantaloons and pirate shirt long gone, the relentless salesmanship that brought him to schools all over the Western United States takes a different form: Instagram countdown posts; BookTok interviews; sometimes popping into the Eragon subreddit, whose moderators get a shout out in the acknowledgments of “Murtagh.” If he finds it hard to keep up the “Hey guys! Hit ‘Like’ and ‘Subscribe!’” cheer, he tries not to show it. Asked whether he found it difficult, given his upbringing, to promote himself to the public, he shrugged. “Look, you do what you have to. You learn how to do it. You can wake me up in the middle of the night, kick me in front of an audience, and I can ad-lib any presentation.”
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At his Comic Con talk, he asked the audience to bear with him: “At the end of the book tour, the presentation is going to be perfectly polished, with every joke perfectly metered and delivered with the, you know, tone and timing — but today I’m going to be stumbling through it.” He didn’t stumble, of course — not even when he was asked to speak a little Dwarvish, rolling his r’s with obvious relish.
During the question-and-answer period, he always answered in the affirmative: Will he develop more dragon characters? Oh, absolutely. Are there more backstories for the corrupt dragon riders, known as the Forsworn? Yes — in fact, there will be some in the new novel. Will the character of Angela, who seems to show up whenever something interesting is happening, get her own plot? Yes — maybe even her own book. It all seemed completely sincere. He plans, after all, to write in this universe for the rest of his life.
