Written Interview: Nicholas Sparks
At WGA.org, this interview with novelist and now screenwriter Nicholas Sparks:
The author of The Notebook and A Walk to Remember is a happily married father of five, and a man of nearly military precision, earnest specificity, and mogul drive. He’s more diligent overachiever than lovesick romantic lead. He rises at 5:30 a.m., works out several hours a day, coaches track, and has funded and built a Christian school in his community in North Carolina, all while producing no less than an allotted 2000 words a day. If he had not been catapulted to millionaire status by The Notebook in 1996 — he promised himself he’d be a millionaire before he was 30 and just made the cut off by a few months — the self-taught writer, who studied business finance in college, says he would have been a hedge fund manage.
So if you think your broken heart’s gonna make you millions, ya might wanna try some hard work.
His new screenplay-turned-novel, The Last Song, represents a change in what has been a ritualistic production regime over the last decade and a half. Rather than a novel that became a film, this came from a story idea Sparks pitched to Disney and Miley Cyrus. Instead of another writer adapting his novel to a screenplay, for the first time Sparks not only wrote the script — with co-writer Jeff Van Wie — but he did it before writing the novel.
Sparks’ movie credits include Message in a Bottle (1999) (novel), A Walk to Remember (2002) (novel), The Notebook (2004) (novel), Nights in Rodanthe (2008) (novel), Dear John (2010/I) (novel), and The Last Song (2010) (book) (screenplay). Some excerpts from the interview:
This must have been a different experience to write the novel after having written a screenplay?
Yes and no. I suppose my biggest disappointment was that after finishing the screenplay, which was about 105 pages or so, I thought writing the novel would be easier. It was not. It was as hard as every novel I’ve ever written.
Not harder or less hard?
Not harder or less hard. All novels I write are exceptionally challenging.
So it’s usually a struggle?
It is very much a struggle.
What is the hardest part for you?
The hardest part for me goes hand in hand with the genre in which I work. In many genres you read these stories because you know what to expect in terms of voice and structure and pacing. Elements of the story might be different, but the structure and voice and pacing tend to be the same. People read a lot of different authors because they like the way these elements are handled.
In my particular genre it’s imperative to vary the voice, the pacing and the structure as well as the story because people read them to be surprised. Every time I sit down to write, it feels like I’m reinventing the wheel. So I’ve had novels I’ve written in first person, I’ve combined first and third person, I’ve written in third person, I’ve written in limited third person omniscient. I have written long novels, short novels, and medium novels. I have written novels with many characters and novels with only a few characters. I have written novels from the point of view of a woman, from a man, from an 80-year-old man, from a 29-year-old divorced female to a soldier to, in this particular case, a 17-year-old girl.
Any Nicholas Sparks’ fans out there? What do you most like about his stories?