NS: It's poison as far as literature is concerned as well. One thing that characterizes your work is you don't shy away from sentiment, which can often be perceived as sentimentality and is sometimes poison where films are concerned. I would say that there are certain of my novels that I think would be very tough to adapt to film and that will probably never be adapted for that reason.

So, if I see an idea that's been done in film, I try to avoid that, because again, I'm just doing my best to be original. It would be original as a novel but it was a very big film.

I could never write a love story based on or that was set on the Titanic. Right? I'll cut to the chase and make it very simple. In this world that we live in, you have originality in literature but you also have television. What I try to do with any of my stories, any of my novels, is make them feel very original. They don't impact necessarily what I write, but they do impact what I don't write. Have the movies impacted the way you write novels? I live in North Carolina far away from here. Even, for instance, when I did 'The Last Song,' and I wrote the screenplay for that, for me, it was primarily in the conception and all of this going to be a novel and then I wrote the screenplay and then they made that too. Whether or not it gets made or gets purchased, that has very little to do with it. NS: No, No, in the end, for me, the sole single goal is to write the best novel that I can. Has that good run affected how you write your novels - not with the expectation but perhaps with the anticipation that it might be one that somebody is going to want to adapt? Sparks has also sold screenplay adaptations of True Believer and At First Sight. The film rights for his novel, The Lucky One, have been sold to Warner Bros. Sparks also wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation of his novel, The Last Song. They include The Notebook, Message in a Bottle, A Walk to Remember, The Last Song, Dear John, and Nights in Rodanthe. Sparks, who currently resides in North Carolina with his wife and five children, has published fifteen novels of which six have been turned into films. The film also stars Oscar nominee Richard Jenkins. Directed by Oscar nominee Lasse Hallström, Dear John tells the story of John Tyree (Channing Tatum), a young soldier home on leave, and Savannah Curtis (Amanda Seyfried), the idealistic college student he falls in love with during her spring vacation. International best-selling author Nicholas Sparks sat down with us recently to talk about Dear John, the latest film to be adapted from one of his novels.

Author of the notebook and dear john