Nicholas Sparks has published detailed advice for new writers on his own site, and it's refreshingly blunt. He breaks the craft into three parts: study it, read constantly, and actually write. None of it is glamorous, which is probably the point.
Read Everything, Then Read Deeper
Sparks reads a lot, and he thinks you should too. He's said he reads more than a hundred books a year and has since he was fifteen. His method has two stages. Read broadly across genres first to see how different kinds of books work, then read deeply in the genre you want to write.
The deep reading isn't passive. When he studies a thriller, he asks concrete questions: how many characters are there, how long is it, how does the author build suspense? Then he reads another and asks again, until the patterns start to show themselves.
That habit predates his career by decades. Reading widely is where he says he first absorbed pacing, structure, and the rhythm of natural dialogue, long before he ever tried to sell a book of his own. He treats every book he finishes as a lesson, good or bad.
Learn the Craft on Purpose
He also points writers toward books about writing itself. On his site he recommends titles like On Writing by Stephen King and The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, among others on character and plot. The idea is simple: writing is a skill you can study, the same as any other.
His craft list runs beyond those two. He's also pointed writers to Creating Fiction, edited by Julie Checkoway, along with other books on character and plot. Nobody is born knowing how to structure a scene or pace a chapter, so his answer is to go learn it the way you'd learn any trade.
Write, and Keep Writing
The last piece is the one people skip. You have to produce pages, and Sparks is direct about it.
You can't be a writer if you don't write, it's just that simple.
Nicholas Sparks, on nicholassparks.com
He's living proof of the idea. Before The Notebook sold, Sparks had written fiction that never found a publisher, and he kept writing anyway. The habit of finishing what you start, he's suggested, is what eventually separates the writers who break through from the ones who only talk about it.
He backs it with his own routine of five or six days a week and a couple of thousand words a day. He's also blunt about conflict: a love story needs a real reason the two people can't simply be together, or there's no drama to hold a reader.
There's a mechanical point he returns to as well. A secret, revealed at the right moment, can drive both the plot and the reader's emotions, and it pulls the reader closer to the story. It's the kind of specific advice that comes from building the same emotional machine many times over. See the full Nicholas Sparks writing routine for how he puts it into practice.
What You Can Steal
- Read like a student. Ask how a book is built, then read another and ask the same questions again.
- Treat craft as learnable. Work through the standard books on writing instead of guessing.
- Put conflict at the center. Give your characters a real reason they can't have what they want.
- Write on a schedule. His whole philosophy comes down to actually producing pages.