Star power: Highly popular novelist to pass through Rogers
Posted on Friday, October 3, 2008
He needed another outlet, another way to express himself after his left Achilles tendon ruined his collegiate running plans during his freshman campaign at the University of Notre Dame.
Nicholas Sparks' mother encouraged him to do something constructive -- in the place of pouting -- with the newfound time that was beginning to haunt him.
"What?"her son asked.
"I don't know. Write a book,"she responded.
And so began the story of one of the most popular contemporary authors in America with a plot line that even he would have a hard time constructing.
Sparks will be in the area from Oct. 10-11 as a guest of the Rogers Public Library Foundation during a tour to publicize his latest novel," The Lucky One,"which was released Tuesday.
As the author of seven books that have hit No. 1 on The New York Times Best Sellers list, he is one of the most highly sought writers on the planet for speaking engagements. Out of hundreds of requests, he makes a few of such visits a year.
So why did Northwest Arkansas have a winning ticket?
"I love the people. I love the culture. I love the geography,"said Sparks by phone on Sept. 26, the same day his fifth book-turned-movie," Nights in Rodanthe,"debuted nationally. "Arkansas is very much like North Carolina in that it has a lot of the best parts of what the South still is and that's what draws me there."
The 42-year-old Sparks responded favorably last March to a hand-written letter from Maureen Cover-Bryan, the foundation's executive director.
"I thought that it was a community that he would be comfortable bringing his family to,"Cover-Bryan said. "I think he responded to that."
The author mentioned that he has been to Arkansas 20 times, most recently as the coach of the New Bern (N.C.) High School track team at a Arkansas High School Invitational in Fayetteville in January.
Sparks spoke from his cell phone while "hiding"in a bookstore of New Bern, the town that provides a setting that is found in many of his novels. With one hand holding his phone, he used his other to sign his name onto 2,300 advanced copies of "The Lucky One"for readers who couldn't be at the store on Tuesday for the start of yet another national book tour.
On top of all that, he has been rewriting the first draft of a screenplay of a Disney movie that is being written for the entertainment giant's brightest starlet, Miley Cyrus. At the same time, he is writing the book version of the story, which will be released next September, a few weeks before the movie's debut. Any other shred of free time goes to his wife and his five children.
"I am about as busy as a human being can be,"Sparks admitted.
In addition to giving a speech and signing autographs at the "Conversations with Nicholas Sparks"event on Oct. 11 and attending a private party at the library on Oct. 10, Sparks will present a seminar on creative writing to high school students and teachers from Bentonville and Rogers. He offered some advice for everyone else.
"Writing a good story with honesty, being yourself and having the ability to keep the pages turning"is key, he said. "I try to impress that it's a skill like any other. There's a learning curve. Persistence is very important as are realistic expectations. You have to know what kind of novelist you want to be."
It took Sparks three novels before he found his calling. His first two efforts, a horror story and a murder mystery, were written after his track injury but were never published. He now refers to them as his "school for writing."It wasn't until he was a pharmaceutical salesman with a young family that he decide "to give writing a real, legitimate shot again"at the age of 28 in 1994.
When he first started writing, his mind kept drifting back to the story of his wife's grandparents, Lucien and Ina, who had both recently passed away.
"They told me about their story,"Sparks said. "It was a story I thought I could tell well because I was close to it."
Their story became the impetus for "The Notebook,"a book that Warner Books bought the rights for $1 million, which later went on to be a major motion picture in 2004.
Sparks is not one to label his books as romances. Still, like a sack of onions, he has a knack of making readers tear up -- both male and female.
How does he do it?
"Well that's the magic secret. It's something that frankly most authors can't do because that's the most challenging thing: to evoke general emotion without manipulation.
"I know it when I see it. When I'm moving to those areas of the novels, they have to be done just right ... There's almost a poetic feel to the movement."
Perhaps like Cover-Bryan's letter.
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