Author and producer Nicholas Sparks on the different rules with writing  and resonating with audience - video Dailymotion

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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.

Author and producer Nicholas Sparks on the different rules with writing and resonating with audience

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