It’s Hard to Have a Dream: Tomi Adeyemi’s Journey of Perseverance and Magic

In a packed yet cozy panel room at Chicago’s C2E2 convention this year, author Tomi Adeyemi beamed out at an audience holding her books in their hands. Adeyemi, only thirty-one years old, is already a Hugo- and Nebula Award–winning, New York Times #1 bestselling novelist and was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people. Yet as she reflected on the whirlwind journey that brought her here, Adeyemi confessed with characteristic candor: “It’s hard to have a dream.”

She wasn’t being facetious. Adeyemi’s rise to fantasy stardom—from writing fan fiction in her childhood bedroom to seeing her imagination come alive on a Hollywood film set—was thirteen years in the making. “It’s hard to acknowledge that dream, to speak it out loud, and to hold a vision for it,” she told us, describing the uphill battle of pursuing her passion. “And then it’s hard to go for that dream with confidence, instead of shame or embarrassment.”

But go for it she did. Now with her debut trilogy Legacy of Orïsha complete—capped by 2024’s Children of Anguish and Anarchy, the powerful finale to the saga—Adeyemi has reached what she calls “the other side of the mountaintop.” It’s the side where dreams become reality. In her words, seeing the culmination of her efforts was the moment she could finally tell herself, “Oh, you did it.”

What does it take to climb such a creative mountain? In Adeyemi’s case, a ferocious blend of talent, tenacity, and an unshakable belief in the stories she wanted to tell. As she cheerfully reminded the C2E2 crowd, she had always envisioned this success. For years, she held fast to the image of her story on the big screen, long before Hollywood came calling. “Everyone kept asking me, ‘Could you ever imagine this?’” she said of visiting the set of her upcoming film. “I was like—I imagined it for thirteen years. Of course I did!”

That steadfast vision carried her through early rejections, massive book deals, and even a showdown with the biggest studio in the business (more on that later). Adeyemi’s journey has been anything but easy, but it’s clear that her ability to imagine her dream into existence—and work relentlessly to achieve it—has been her superpower from the start.

I was lucky enough to catch up with her after her spotlight panel to chat about her creative philosophy, and find out what young authors can take from it to manifest their own dreams.

Magic Grounded in Heritage

One of the most striking aspects of Adeyemi’s work is how real her fantasy feels. Her breakout novel, Children of Blood and Bone, conjures the richly imagined land of Orïsha, full of magic-wielding maji and divine spirits. The world is so vivid and immersive that I swore I could feel the ocean breeze of its beaches and the thrum of its drums while I was reading. That authenticity is no accident—it’s drawn directly from Adeyemi’s own heritage and a moment of personal discovery that changed her life.

Source: Macmillan

During her spotlight panel, Adeyemi shared the inspiring story of Orïsha’s inception. A decade ago, Adeyemi was a college student on a research trip in Brazil, studying Afro-Brazilian history. One rainy day, she ducked into a tiny gift shop in the state of Bahia—and found destiny waiting on a shelf. “I see the Orisha, these dark-skinned African gods and goddesses, and it had never even occurred to me that there could be African gods and goddesses,” she recalls.

On a set of watercolor plates, she saw striking images of the Orisha—deities of the Yoruba religion of West Africa—depicted as beautiful Black divinities with colorful, flowing garments. Adeyemi was stunned. “It was like literal fireworks went off in my brain. I saw the landscapes, I saw the lions, I saw the temples. I saw the magic,” she says, describing the vision that erupted from that encounter. In that instant, a whole fantasy world unfurled in her mind’s eye. She didn’t yet know the characters or the plot but, as she puts it, “the world came fully formed.”

That lightning-strike moment in Brazil planted the seed for what would become Orïsha in her novels—a fantasy realm inspired by West African mythology, but also a vessel for something deeply personal.

Adeyemi, the child of Nigerian (Yoruba) immigrants, soon realized she was rediscovering herself through this story. “As I wrote, I discovered I was actually exploring a part of my own Nigerian-American ancestry,” she says. She describes the almost spiritual wonder of the process: “To climb all the way back up your family tree on accident, and discover the stories and the beliefs and the spirituality and the songs and the power… to stumble into my ancestry, which then also became my destiny, is absolutely insane.” The magic of Orïsha is layered with the real rhythms of her heritage, a fusion of fantasy and ancestral memory. It’s political, spiritual, ancestral. By tapping into the folklore and faith of her forebears, Adeyemi imbued her fiction with an authenticity that resonates across cultures.

“We were gods,” she remembers thinking in that shop, realizing that in her lineage lay a wellspring of epic stories and heroes that had been largely untapped in popular fantasy. Adeyemi’s work channels that legacy onto the page.

Epic Worlds, Intimate Voices

Given the grand scale of Adeyemi’s storytelling—divine magic, royal intrigue, battles to save a kingdom—one might assume her books sacrifice personal detail for epic scope. But the opposite is true: her writing balances mythic stakes with intimate, human voices.

The result is a narrative that feels at once huge and small, epic and deeply personal. How does she achieve that equilibrium? By truly living in her story, scene by scene, emotion by emotion. It’s what struck me during my first read-through of her trilogy, and what continues to strike me as I listen to her describe this razor-thin line she’s mastered.

For Adeyemi, writing a novel is a lot like directing a film that only she can see. “Readers who have noticed the cinematic quality of her books may not be surprised to hear that’s how [she] experiences these stories, too,” notes People magazine. Adeyemi confirms that when she’s crafting a scene, she sees and hears everything in her mind’s eye: the sweeping landscapes, the crackling flames, the characters’ voices and heartbeats. “I see the scenes, I hear the music, I hear the dialogue—the slow motion, the speed, everything,” she says.

Writing, for her, often begins with transcribing that internal movie onto the page as vividly as possible. She’ll even sketch maps of her world and collect photos for inspiration, like a production designer building a set. This cinematic approach ensures the world of the story feels tangible.

But visuals are only half the equation. Adeyemi is equally dedicated to capturing the emotional truth of her characters. She shared that her drafting process typically involves multiple passes: first, get the image and action down; then, enrich it with sensory details and atmosphere; finally, drill down into what each character is truly feeling in that moment. “Not what’s in your head—what is [the character] feeling?” she emphasizes. It’s in that final step that the story’s intimacy shines. Zélie, Amari, and the other young heroes of Orïsha are relatable and real because Adeyemi writes from inside their skin, not as distant pawns on a chessboard.

Even as the plot hurtles forward with chase sequences and magical duels, the narrative never loses sight of the personal stakes driving each character, be that the grief for a lost mother, the sting of betrayal, the hope of acceptance, or the spark of first love. These intimate threads keep the reader emotionally invested amid the spectacle.

Interestingly, Adeyemi’s immersive style was born from a challenge: she jokes that she has a short attention span as a reader. Dense blocks of lore or convoluted fantasy rules can make her mind wander. So she crafts her story in a way that she herself would find gripping with clear, tactile descriptions and emotionally charged motivations to propel the action. If a setting or magical rule doesn’t engage her, she won’t inflict it on the reader.

In short, Adeyemi writes for herself, the kind of story that would have kept her turning pages as a teen. It’s a simple trick that more writers could learn from: by making the fantastical feel immediate and visceral, she never loses her audience in the weeds. As a result, her world-building soars but always stays grounded in the heartbeat of her characters.

Protecting the Story’s Integrity (All the Way to Hollywood)

From the moment Children of Blood and Bone hit shelves in 2018, Hollywood was knocking at Adeyemi’s door. A film deal came quickly. Almost too quickly.

Adeyemi sold the movie rights early, and for a time she was only a consultant on the adaptation. For many authors, that might be enough. Not for Adeyemi. As she readily admits, “I hate when I see a bad movie.” This is a creator who once ranted, with great humor, about how even a big-budget production can be ruined for her by a single shoddy wig or cheap-looking prop. For Adeyemi, it wasn’t just about getting her books made into a movie; it was about making a great movie that captured the magic and heart of her story.

So she fought for it.

In 2021, when progress on the adaptation had stalled under a major studio, Adeyemi took a bold stand. She was frustrated with the slow pace and asked to write the script herself (a request the studio declined). The project wound up in turnaround, essentially dead in the water.

Many authors would have been disheartened. Adeyemi got busy.

By early 2022, she and her team moved the film to Paramount Pictures, where she was welcomed as a screenwriter and executive producer on the project. In hindsight, that move was a masterstroke. It not only gave Adeyemi creative control to protect her story’s integrity, it also attracted an all-star production team to rebuild the film from the ground up.

Now the adaptation is barreling forward at full speed. Award-winning director Gina Prince-Bythewood (known for powerful action-dramas like The Woman King) came aboard to cowrite the script with Adeyemi and helm the film. The cast, as Adeyemi gleefully teased at C2E2, is absolutely stacked: Thuso Mbedu (star of The Woman King) will lead as Zélie, with a lineup of luminaries including Viola Davis, Idris Elba, Cynthia Erivo, Regina King, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and many more in supporting roles. “We’ve got three different generations [of Black actors] all immersed in this project,” Adeyemi marveled, hinting that some up-and-coming young talents are poised to become household names through these roles.

Source: Variety

Perhaps most exciting was Adeyemi’s report from the set itself. She spent several weeks on location in early 2025, watching her imagined world of Orïsha come to life. The experience left her awestruck. “Every day was absolutely grueling,” she said—sixteen-hour shoot days, six days a week, intense stuntwork, and high emotion—“and my goodness, I have never seen anything like [Thuso Mbedu’s performance as Zélie].” Adeyemi described the visceral thrill of witnessing scenes she’d pictured for years finally unfolding in front of her. The very first fight sequence they filmed had her practically leaping out of her seat with adrenaline. “I literally almost flipped my chair over at the monitor,” she laughed, recalling the surge of female rage and ferocity that coursed through her watching Zélie battle on screen. If that was her reaction to an early scene, one can only imagine the impact of the finale. Adeyemi promised the movie would be “absolutely exceptional—not just as an adaptation, but as a great adventure in its own right.”

From the beginning, Adeyemi’s guiding principle for the film was integrity: to deliver a cinematic experience as magical as the book felt. That meant no detail was too small to get right. She even put her foot down about things like the characters’ contact lenses (the maji in Orïsha have luminous eyes) and, yes, the quality of their wigs and hair. “I will not have a bad weave in my movie,” she declared to audience laughter.

Adeyemi knows that fantasy works best when you believe in the world completely – and nothing takes you out of a story faster than a visual flaw that breaks the illusion. The good news is that everyone involved shared her high standards. From the production designer who built full-scale sets so enchanting that wild birds and butterflies started visiting (a true anecdote!) to the costume designer who infused each garment with Yoruba artistry, the crew brought their A-game. “When I got to be with the two hundred people whose names you’ll see at the end of the movie—and they are exceptional, so dedicated—it was incredible,” Adeyemi said. “We are immaculate, even the contact lenses!” she added, grinning.

We also now have a release date: January 15, 2027 in IMAX. Mark your calendars, fantasy fans, because this is one cinematic event you won’t want to miss. By insisting on being both storyteller and guardian of her creation, Adeyemi has ensured that Children of Blood and Bone will hit the screen with all the might and magic it deserves.

Rage, Reality, and the Role of Fantasy

When I spoke with Adeyemi, I asked her what she thinks the fantasy genre needs right now. What should authors and creators be striving to do? Her answer was thoughtful. She believes fantasy has a vital role to play in helping young people process the harsh realities of our time.

“I would rather phrase it as what I hope fantasy does right now,” she began, “which is to give kids a chance to reflect our very broken world.” We live in an age, she noted, where gruesome news and violence are impossible to shield from young eyes; social media can inundate teens with images of bloodshed and injustice. “There’s a lot of pain, there’s a lot of violence,” Adeyemi said, and many young readers are grappling with fear, anger, and confusion about it all.

Fantasy, she suggested, can be a safe space to explore those emotions. By encountering difficult themes in a story, one step removed from reality, kids and teens can confront feelings that might otherwise overwhelm them. In Adeyemi’s words, her wish is that fantasy stories will let youth know they’re not alone in these complicated emotions, and “give jumping points for conversations” about the issues underlying them. In other words, a great fantasy can open the door for real-world understanding and empathy, rather than leaving kids to face their fears in isolation.

It’s a beautiful way to think about the genre: not as pure escapism, but as an imaginative echo of reality that, ultimately, helps us cope with and change that reality.

That said, Adeyemi’s stories are far from grim sermons. They burn with what she calls “ferocious female rage,” but also sparkle with humor, love, and hope. These elements are stunningly woven into her narratives in a way that seventeen-year-old me (that’s when I first encountered Adeyami’s work) needed, so I know firsthand the impact of her art.

Perseverance and Creative Process: Advice from Tomi

Considering all she’s accomplished by age thirty-one, it’s easy to mythologize Adeyemi’s success. I’ll admit, before our conversation, I wanted to chalk it up to her being a mythological demigod or something. But if there’s one thing she insists on sharing, it’s that none of it came easy and aspiring writers should know that.

During our interview, she lit up when giving practical advice to fellow storytellers, eager to pay forward the guidance she’s received. One of her top tips is surprisingly simple: build your writing muscle little by little.

Adeyemi compares it to training for a marathon. When she struggled to get back into a writing routine after the whirlwind of her debut, she developed a technique that changed everything. “Get a cute little baking timer,” she said, smiling. “Set it for two minutes, and write for those two minutes. When the timer goes off, stop, and reward yourself with a break.” The next day, do it again. “One day,” she promised, “the timer’s gonna go off and you’re gonna be like, ‘I actually have a couple more words in me,’ and you’ll keep going.” It’s all about lowering the stakes: anyone can write for 120 seconds. But consistency is key.

Adeyemi used this method herself in 2022, starting at five minutes a day. She laughed as she admitted that after her first five-minute session, she “promptly passed out for three hours” from the mental exhaustion. Writing is hard work, even for the pros! But she kept at it, adding a few minutes each week. “By six months, I could set that timer for fifty-five minutes and do that seven times in a row,” she said. With this gradual training, she not only completed the first drafts of her next novel in record time, she did so without the burnout and anxiety that had plagued her earlier writing process. “This technique made writing my happy place again,” Adeyemi shared. Instead of approaching the blank page with dread or pressure, she retrained herself to find joy in the act of creation, a few minutes at a time.

It’s advice any creator who’s ever struggled with procrastination or self-doubt should take to heart: start small, but start.

Adeyemi’s other piece of advice is more philosophical but just as important: have a vision for your career, and don’t be afraid of it. She encourages writers to dream big and define success on their own terms. In her case, she’s never been shy about her ambition. She wanted to write bestselling books and see them adapted into blockbuster films, and she pursued those goals with laser focus. Far from apologizing for her drive, Adeyemi embraces it. She likens her mindset to an athlete gunning for a championship.

Growing up in the Chicago area, she idolized Michael Jordan and the Bulls. That legendary competitive spirit rubbed off. After scoring her third #1 bestseller in a row, she didn’t rest on her laurels; she quipped, “I need three rings,” imagining the trilogy as her personal three-peat victory. This isn’t ego talking so much as it is pure determination. Adeyemi advises emerging writers to cultivate that inner fire and hold on to their big dreams, even if they sound outrageous to others. “It needs to be incredibly specific,” she says of your vision. Picture it in detail—the book launch, the fan art, the movie premiere, whatever lights you up—and then step by step, make it real. It won’t be easy (nothing worthwhile ever is), but Adeyemi’s career proves that outrageous dreams can come true with talent, hard work, and unyielding self-belief.

A New Chapter Ahead

With the Legacy of Orïsha trilogy now behind her, you might wonder: what’s next for Tomi Adeyemi? Far from resting, she is already deep into crafting her next saga—one she’s incredibly excited about. She is currently writing a brand-new novel, the first in a fresh universe separate from Orïsha. All she’s willing to reveal for now is that it’s set in our world (a departure from the pure fantasy realms of her past work) and that it’s “the story of my soul.” In fact, she describes it as the most personal and deeply intimate tale she’s ever attempted. “I wake up every morning and I want to work on this book so badly,” she gushed, her eyes shining. That kind of genuine enthusiasm is infectious—and it bodes well for readers eager to see her range.

The excitement on her face said it all: Tomi Adeyemi is just getting started, and the best may be yet to come.

As our conversation wrapped up, Adeyemi reflected on how surreal it feels to have completed one epic journey and to be standing at the beginning of another. There’s a sense that she has come full circle to the pure love of storytelling that first set her on this path.

“It’s hard to have a dream,” she reminded me. But if there’s one thing her journey proves, it’s that even the hardest dreams are worth holding on to. Whether you’re a reader, a writer, or simply someone trying to make your own dream come true, the message is clear in the legacy of Tomi Adeyemi: keep going, believe in your magic, and never be afraid to dream in the biggest, boldest way. Your story is only just beginning.