Nicholas Sparks on The Lucky One: sob stories that cinema can't resist Sparks is an ebullient, athletic-looking 46-year-old who slaps me on the back and calls me "Boss" when we meet in a Beverly Hills hotel. He clearly enjoys talking about himself and his work and, unlike some novelists, insists on being totally involved in the process of turning his books into films. The longer I've been in this industry the more I've learnt and the more involved I've become. Sometimes I'll write the screenplay; other times I'll produce the film. But always I serve as a consultant and work very closely with the producers. I go to the set and talk; I have input on who is in the film and who directs it and all the decisions. I have three rules I have not changed since the beginning and I stand firm on them. You have to retain the spirit and the intent of the story, retain the spirit and intent of the character, and then make the best film you possibly can. The Lucky One, described by Warner Bros as "a romantic drama," follows the Sparks formula. It stars Zac Efron as a US Marine sergeant in Iraq who finds a photograph of a woman he doesn't know, but who he believes is somehow keeping him alive. So on returning to the US he sets out to find her and a romance develops. But, of course, complications - and a tragedy - ensue. There are more Sparks stories - and probably movies - in the pipeline. His 17th novel is waiting to be published and he has started work on the 18th. A devout Roman Catholic who goes to church every week, he writes at his home in North Carolina, where he lives with his wife of 23 years and their five children, aged between 10 and 20. When I write I always have the television on in the background playing DVDs of old television shows I've seen a hundred times before, like Seinfeld, House, Law and Order and Star Trek. So when I start a book I start at episode one on the DVD, hit play and let it run all the way through. I just like the background noise. Sparks grew up in Fair Oaks, California, and attended the University of Notre Dame on a track and field scholarship. He was, he tells me, "a very good student," and an excellent runner who dreamed of representing the US at the Olympics. He broke the Notre Dame record as part of a relay team in 1985, a record that still stands, but he was injured and had to spend the summer resting, so while still at school he wrote his first novel, a horror story called The Passing. It has never been published and it never will be, he says. I picked it up again four or five years ago and read five pages and thought, 'Oh, this is awful. What was I thinking as I was writing this?"" He tried again when he was 22, this time with a murder mystery which, although never published either, gave him the confidence to continue. So when I sat down to write The Notebook, when I was 28, I was a little bit more mature and I knew how to do it. All I had to do was make it good. The Notebook, a tale of love-lost-and-found loosely based on the story of his grandparents, was a huge success, making the New York Times bestseller list in its first week and becoming a hit movie starring Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams. He gave up his job selling pharmaceuticals and, he says: "I've been writing these kind of things ever since. If The Notebook had bombed, I might be writing horror, or murder mysteries or thrillers. Or I might not be writing at all. The Lucky One opens on May 2