When Nicholas Sparks sat down to write The Lucky One, he drew upon his own experience as a former track-and-field coach who watched some of his athletes graduate and embark on deployments to the Middle East. "They all come back changed," Sparks said to the audience at a Chicago screening of the resulting film.
In the film, Logan, an ex-Marine, finds a photograph of a girl that becomes his lucky charm in battle. When he returns to the U.S., his immediate focus is to find this girl, Beth, and he ends up falling in love with her. Both Logan and Beth have emotional baggage of their own, and they fight to remain hopeful throughout the course of the movie.
North By Northwestern: Logan is crazy because of war. Beth is crazy because her brother died in war. How important is it for the audience to get the sense that they're in the same boat as far as that goes?
Nicholas Sparks: It's very important. I don't know if crazy is the appropriate word. We're really looking for flawed, and I think that that's incredibly important because what we're trying to do as we craft these stories is creating characters that feel very real and very accessible. These are universal problems. These are people that, a) you like because they're trying to do the right thing, and b) it's hard. Life is hard. And yet even in the midst of all this, you know sometimes you can fall in love, and that love can transform you. You'll meet someone and maybe feel more complete, so to speak. And those are part of the reasons why I think these films or novels work. You see them and think, "Oh my gosh, that could be my neighbor."
NBN: Did you envision the whole selflessness thing from the beginning, or did that come in after you started writing about the Marine character?
NS: Selflessness is part and parcel with most novels I write. Part of that goes to just who I am as a writer. When I sit down and try and create a female character, I've got to like this person, so I've got to write someone that I find myself attracted to. They're all just various versions of each other. They're all intelligent. They're passionate. They do not define themselves by the guy in their life. They do have a tendency toward loyalty and doing the right thing, which might be called selflessness. So this is what I find attractive, and I ended up marrying this type of person. So I'm like, "Huh, what did I have to do to win this girl's heart?" Well, I had to be a little selfless too, and I had to do the right thing. These are the things I had to do. So if she doesn't need you, you have to make her at least want you. And to do that you can't be a jerk. So that means Logan has to be a pretty good guy. And he is.
NBN: Would you say the ending of this movie is affected by the same fate that interplays in the entire movie? Or is it rather breaking from fate?
NS: Once something happens, a random event or coincidence, maybe a random photograph, after that conscious and unconscious decisions are going to be made. And this journey will lead you to a conclusion. Whatever that conclusion may be, it'll get you somewhere. And then when you look back it seems like fate had everything in mind, but it's really the choices we make. It's the choices Beth made. It's the choices Logan, Ben [her son] and Keith [her ex] made. And in the end, life is full of thousands and thousands of journeys, and this is one of them. And all journeys come to an end.
NBN: What is your favorite part of the entire writing process?
NS: Writing the last sentence. It's not a joyful process for me. It's a very challenging process to get it exactly right, and it is a marathon. It takes five months for me to write a novel, and I know it doesn't seem that long to you guys, but if it's always in your head and doesn't seem like it can escape, it's pretty all-encompassing. It's not a job that I can leave and not think about the book until the next day, you know. You have to know what you're gonna write tomorrow, and oftentimes there's a twist because you're trying to be original, and you're going through all of these things.
Check out our review of The Lucky One, which hits theaters April 20.