Novelist Nicholas Sparks to speak about writing, story ideas

If you ask 17-time New York Times No. 1 best-selling author Nicholas Sparks why he writes romance novels, he will answer you with, "I don't."

"I write novels where the themes of love and family and loss are often explored," he said in a phone interview with the Southeast Missourian on Friday.

It started with "The Notebook," then "Message in a Bottle," and now he is halfway through writing his 18th novel. And people keep reading them.

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it, I suppose," Sparks said. "And the great thing about writing about themes of love and family and loss is that you're allowed to use elements of other genres in those to make the stories really come alive."

Sparks will speak at 7:30 p.m. Monday at the Show Me Center as part of Southeast Missouri State University's Speakers Series.

Sparks' audience finds it easy to relate to the characters, he said, because there is a universality to the stories that strike people as real. The characters have a humanity to them. They get frustrated, angry, they feel loss and they struggle.

Readers are able to see whispers or shadows of their own experiences, he said.

"Not everyone is a famous astronaut or gets involved in a murder industry," Sparks said. "Everyone falls in love. Everyone suffers loss."

The conception of an idea for a novel can take two weeks or a year, he said. It's difficult because, though he retains the same major elements of the story people enjoy -- love, loss, family and all the major emotions of life -- making a story entirely different so the reader isn't reading the same story over and over again can take time.

Sparks questions how to make his next novel different; how to surprise the reader.

He has incorporated elements from different genres of literature, such as mystery, danger and supernatural elements, to keep the stories different, such as length, tone, voice, perspective, structure, the age of characters and the dilemmas they face, but the underlying elements the same.

Sparks's goal is to write 2,000 words a day, and at that pace it takes about six months to complete a novel, splitting his time among writing, editing, traveling and working on other projects.

"There have been certainly massive rewrites that I've had to do," he said, but 14 of his 17 novels have come in ready for a two-month editing process, followed by publication and a promotional tour.

Then he begins thinking of a new novel, and "there you go. Life starts up again," he said.

Sparks' career path and dedication to writing novels have certainly changed from his teenage years, when he wrote his first novel at age 19 to see if he could do it.

He was a freshman running track for the University of Notre Dame on a full scholarship when he got injured, taking away his ability to run, which was "far and away the most important thing in my world," he said.

"... I kind of went a little nuts, you know, emotionally, I did. All my dreams going up in smoke, physically I had all this energy I couldn't burn off, right? And my mom got tired of me pouting around the house. She said, 'Look, don't just pout, do something,' and I said, 'What?' 'I don't know, go write a novel, go write a book.' And I'm like OK. I like to read, I like TV, I like movies, I like stories, so I said 'OK, I'll write myself a book,' so I did," Sparks said. "It was literally a way to pass the time that summer, to see if I could do it."

He wrote another novel during his senior year of college. Neither was published.

Though his college roommates would say Sparks wanted to be a writer, his memory is not as clear.

"I think, in my mind, looking back, it's more like I thought I wanted to be, or it might be interesting to be, but there was no way it was ever actually going to happen," Sparks said of becoming a writer. "It's hard to be a writer for a living."

He compared it to wanting to be an astronaut, which is great, he said, but "wants and gets are often two entirely different things in life," he said.

"But then when I was 28, I kind of had yet another mid-life crisis or a mid-life crisis of sorts at an early age, wondering, 'What am I going to do with my life?' And I said, I'll try writing again, and that time I wrote 'The Notebook.'"

Sparks was selling pharmaceuticals at the time, and his family's schedule worked out where he was able to write from 9 p.m. to midnight, while still working and able to pay his bills and meet his mortgage.

He gave writing a real shot that time, instead of just trying to finish a novel, he said. Fortunately, it worked.

Taking up writing novels as a career has given Sparks the freedom to do other things he enjoys, such as educate disadvantaged and at-risk children, coach a track team, achieve a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, travel the world, and watch his own children grow.

"It's given me the opportunity to live a life of wonderful experiences," Sparks said of his career.

Attendees at Monday's speech can expect to hear where Sparks' stories come from, the stories behind the stories, what his writing process is like, what it's like working in film and what's next on the agenda, among other topics, he said.

Aside from working on his current novel, Sparks said filming for a movie based on his novel "The Best of Me" began Saturday, and filming for "The Longest Ride" will begin in May. He has two TV projects in the works, one for Lifetime TV and the other for TNT, and he just received the rights for "The Notebook" to hit the Broadway stage, among other projects.

Sparks' advice to aspiring writers? Know what you want to accomplish.

"I don't think that most writers do," he said. "I think that most writers dream, but they don't really know."

Writing a story about one's family because it deserves to be told is a different kind of book than one that sells a million copies, because doing that incorporates being an excellent writer who is able to write a biography and knows how to make it unique, he gave as an example.

A writer needs to know what they mean when they say they want to be a writer.

"Do you only want to write what you want to write, or do you want to write what you think your readers might want to read?" Sparks said. "The latter is often much harder than the former. It's very easy for one to write their opinions, what they think about things, but it's not necessarily something that everyone will want to read."

Some writers don't devote enough time to that all-important question, he said.

"I wanted to write stories that a lot of people wanted to read. That was my goal when I was 28," he said.

ashedd@semissourian.com

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