Nicholas Sparks knows how to tell an emotional love story.
He has sold more than 55 million books and has seen several of his books turned into movies. Recently, audiences got the chance to see another of his book-to-film adaptations, “The Lucky One.”
“The Lucky One” tells the story of a young Marine (Zac Efron) whose life is saved by a mysterious photograph of a beautiful woman (Taylor Schilling). It is the seventh feature film to be based on one of Sparks’ books.
Sparks has a great track record with film adaptations. The movies based on his writings — “The Notebook,” “Message in a Bottle,” “A Walk to Remember,” “Dear John,” “Nights in Rodanthe” and “The Last Song” — have earned more than $300 million.
“When I am writing now, I will think about how a scene would look in a movie. There also have been times, like with Miley Cyrus for ‘The Last Song,’ where I had a specific person in mind for the role,” Sparks says. “But, the writing remains the same. I just try to tell the best story I can.”
The writing process for “The Lucky One,” as with all his other books, started with a spark of inspiration. The North Carolina resident, who lives near multiple military bases, became intrigued by all of the soldiers coming home from war. Many would bring back some memento of their tour.
Once he had the idea for “The Lucky One,” the writing process took him about five months, turning out about 2,000 words a day.
As he has done with most of the film adaptations, Sparks happily turned over “The Lucky One” to another writer, Will Fetters in this case, to produce the screenplay.
“I understand intuitively that novels and films are different things. A novel is a story told with words. A film is a story told with pictures. Some things work better in one of those mediums than in another. For example, introspection works fabulously in books but you can’t film someone thinking with one of those little bubble things over their head.”
He has found that scenes with high emotion — such as anger — or with lots of action read with a certain degree of intensity but generally pale when compared with seeing them played out on the screen.
Sparks understands changes have to be made to go from one of his novels that is about 100,000 words to a movie script that averages 20,000 words. His only rule is that the film script take on the spirit of the story and the characters.
The process has worked. His stories of romance fare OK at the box office and have become huge hits when they hit TV. He estimates “A Walk to Remember,” released in 2002, airs at least 30 times a year on TV.
What’s the key to that success? Sparks doesn’t write romantic fantasies with fairy-tale endings. His stories are rooted more in romantic fact based on average people overcoming obstacles to find love.
His love stories are always layered. In “The Lucky One,” Sparks writes about the love of father-son, grandson-grandmother, mother-son, man-woman and husband-wife. This is a very conscious decision by Sparks.
“I am in a very blessed position because the people who read my novels range in age from 10 years old to 100. When I sit down to write a novel, the first question I decide is ‘What are the ages of the characters who are falling in love?’ Because that will inform dilemma,” Sparks says. “People enjoy books about people their own age because they can relate to them.
“I have done it in novel after novel. You really try to make it good for everyone who reads you.”
