NEW BERN, N.C. (ABP) — To be the best-selling, tear-jerking master writer of romantic fiction, Nicholas Sparks' own life seems, well, pretty mundane.
Spinning heart-throbbing tales is not what life is all about for Sparks, author of “The Notebook,” his third book to be made into a movie. More important for this writer, a committed Christian, is the enduring kind of love experienced in his family and built on faith.
“Writing is not who I am. It's part of what I do,” Sparks told Associated Baptist Press in a recent interview, adding, “Faith plays the central role in my life.”
That said, Sparks has proven himself a master of what he terms “commercial fiction.” Each of his eight published novels has been a national bestseller, beginning in 1996 with “The Notebook,” his first big book but the latest to be adapted to the big screen. After his initial novelistic success, Sparks sold the film rights to his 1998 “Message in a Bottle” before finishing the manuscript. “A Walk to Remember,” published in 1999, became a hit movie in 2002.
Instead of the tortured turns of the artist, Sparks' path to fame followed the day-to-day twists of ordinary life.
A high-school track star in California, Sparks went to the University of Notre Dame on an athletic scholarship. Injured in his freshman year, Sparks wrote his first novel out of boredom the following summer as he nursed an ailing Achilles tendon. Unsatisfied with the novel's simplistic style, Sparks buried the book in the “literary graveyard” of his attic.
Graduating with a degree in business finance, Sparks went back to California and married a girl he had met during his last spring-break trip in college. Another attempt at a novel, this one submitted for publication but rejected, joined his first book upstairs. After several short-term jobs and a try at starting a business, Sparks and his wife moved to North Carolina in search of a more affordable life.
Though successful in the South in his new career selling pharmaceuticals, Sparks, a Roman Catholic, decided to try his hand at writing one more time.
The effort paid off. Warner Books bought the rights to “The Notebook” for $1 million dollars. “I jumped up and down so long I got a cramp in my calf,” Sparks said in an autobiographical sketch on his website, nicholassparks.com.
“The first thing I bought was a new wedding ring for my wife,” he added.
“The Notebook” is a tale of passionate and enduring romance. The love story unfolds in the form of flashbacks as an elderly man, played by veteran actor James Garner, reads from a handwritten notebook to a woman confined to a nursing home because of dementia.
The old man's tale describes the summer love of Southern belle Allie Hamilton (Rachel McAdams) and sawmill worker Noah Calhoun (Ryan Gosling). After the socially mismatched pair falls in love, Allie's aristocratic parents, then World War II, pull the couple apart.
The war over, Noah returns to the South Carolina town where he met Allie and restores a deserted house where the young lovers dreamed of living some day. But Noah seems to have forever lost Allie to an up-and-coming cotton-king beau, the perfect suitor according to her family's elite standards.
As the old man continues to read, the developing story unravels the lovers' triangle and eventually reveals the relationship between the reader, his listener, and the young lovers. And between its frequent cliches, the tale succeeds in portraying an affection that transcends prejudice, war and illness.
Sparks attempts to tell decent stories by avoiding themes and techniques incongruent with his own standards. “I don't use profanity in my novels,” he explained. While humanly falling short of moral perfection, his characters' lives center on “faith, family, community, friendships,” he said. “And they're all defined by loyalty,” Sparks added.
Dale Brown, director of an annual Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., believes morally inoffensive fiction is finding a publishing niche. Brown cites the case of widely read author Jan Karon, for example, who “talks about trying to write about goodness rather than sin,” Brown said.
The success of this kind of fiction, Brown added, “suggests a market that is tired of the Fox network sort of sleaziness in books and media in general.”
Critic and teacher Randall VanderMey of Westmont College in Santa Barbara, Calif., explained that so-called moral writing runs the gamut from authors who passively avoid objectionable topics to those who, from the standpoint of faith, actively confront the grittiness of human fallenness.
But for Sparks, writing seems less about agendas than making a living and enjoying a balanced life.
“I go to Tae Kwon Do with my kids. We go to church every Sunday. … My wife volunteers at school like every other mom. We still eat Kraft macaroni and cheese,” Sparks wrote. “Our relationship with each other, with our children, with our community, and with God, will always be the most important things in our lives.”
“When I'm writing well, I feel the presence of God,” Sparks said. “I feel this enormous sense of completion and wonder and awe at the gift that I've been given.”
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