Author and producer Nicholas Sparks on the different rules with writing and resonating with audience
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00:00I would like to start off with asking how you connect with readers across different generations
00:05and demographics. Everyone remembers their first Nicholas Sparks. Mine was Walk to Remember in
00:10middle school and it ruined me. So I just wanted to ask you how you continue to do that and what
00:15ways you approach that. Yeah, there's a couple of ways. Number one, I'm very aware of my audience
00:22and I think that's probably the key thing. And I write kind of what I think or I hope
00:30my audience will like to read. I'll give you just a hard and fast rule that I have. Like
00:37if I have, with every new novel that I write, one of the first questions I ask myself is
00:44what are the ages of the characters who will fall in love? Okay? And I make that decision
00:52based upon what I haven't done recently. So for instance, I wrote a Walk to Remember
00:58and that was a teenage love story. And then a few years pass and I did characters in their
01:05thirties, their forties, their fifties and their sixties. I said, okay, now I have to do
01:11teenagers again. And I wrote the last song with Miley Cyrus and then another period of
01:17time, seven, eight years, whatever. I don't know how long then I need to do teenagers again.
01:21And so I did the wish. So, um, it's a simple fact in the publishing world that generally
01:27people like to read about people they relate to. And one of the things they relate to is
01:34the age of the characters. You know, teenagers don't always like to read about elderly people
01:39or people in their fifties or read about people who remind them of their parents. They like
01:43to read about teenagers. So the key is to, for me, that is a hard and fast rule. I vary
01:49the age of the, um, of the characters and then part two of my rule. And, um, I'm sure this
01:59will be of benefit to marketing, uh, people. Um, when I'm trying to conceive a story and characters
02:10and elements, plot elements within the story, I have, I try to have these meet three criteria,
02:20three criteria. I want it to be original. I want it to be interesting and I want it to be
02:29universal. Okay. So, um, it's very easy and most products, whether they're books or films,
02:41those elements will hit two of those three. You know, you can be interesting and original
02:49and come up with Hannibal Lecter very easily or an assassin or some crime. Uh, but they often fail
03:00on universality, i.e. can this happen to me? And the more a reader or a viewer feels like,
03:05hey, this can happen to me in the, in the kind of films that you want to not escape films or escape
03:14television. If you want to feel like it can happen to you, um, that universality is incredibly
03:19important and it's hard to be both universal. It can happen to anyone and, uh, original. I was
03:31talking backstage and I'll give you a hint. Um, this is just a quick story that'll illustrate that.
03:38So you have a couple, it's a Nicholas Sparks novel. They're beginning to move toward the point
03:43where they're going to fall in love. Okay. So I have to come up with something within the context
03:48of the novels I've written and what's on television and things you've seen in film that feels original.
03:56Okay. So I have him get in the car and he drives her to this location. She looks out the window
04:02beyond a chain link fence and she sees a bunch of headstones. She's like, did you bring me to a
04:10cemetery? This is kind of creepy. You know, some people would think this is creepy. And yes,
04:14it does feel creepy. He says, I don't know what this place is. So then he explains,
04:20and the story's taking place in Wilmington. And he explains that, uh, there was a cemetery in
04:26downtown Wilmington was in operation about 1840 to about 1940. Uh, it closed, uh, city continued
04:35building, just true story. They had to put up a road. So the road's going to go through the old cemetery.
04:41They moved none of the bodies. They just moved the headstones to this new location. Kind of like
04:48the movie Poltergeist, right? It's a real place in Wilmington. It's a real place in Wilmington. So you
04:54go there, it's just headstones. There's no bodies. What is that? Right? So, okay. I find that interesting
05:04because has anyone ever seen that? Have you ever seen it in TV, in film? Not really. Uh,
05:12but is it universal? Yes. You read the book. I'll tell you the cemetery. You ever go to Wilmington,
05:17you can go there. So it's things like that. So that's an element within the story. It's the
05:22character within the story, and then it's the overall plot. They should all meet those three criteria.