Nicholas Sparks is giddy. The movie rights to his next book were just sold to Disney, which plans to use the film as not-a-girl, not-yet-a-woman transition project for Miley Cyrus. “I don’t have a title,” the 42-year-old author giggles. Forget the title; Sparks doesn’t have a book yet. Disney bought a blank page, an idea and a pledge from Sparks that he’ll spend a few months working his swooning magic for Cyrus.

It worked in The Notebook and Message in the Bottle. And it’s the same formula Sparks mixes in Nights in Rodanthe, his latest novel to be splashed onto the big screen, this time a middle-age affair starring Richard Gere and Diane Lane.

Sparks has penned 14 works in 13 years and his next, The Lucky One, was out last week. Long way to come for a guy who was selling pharmaceuticals when he was 28. He decided to give writing a real shot and started with the story of his wife’s grandparents. It took six months to finish. That novel, The Notebook, was on The New York Times bestseller list for over a year.

The others have poured forth quickly ever since. All of them about love. Sparks puts himself in the same category as Sophocles, Shakespeare and Hemingway. “To make your characters universal, so everybody can feel like they know them, and to make it original, it’s incredibly hard,” he says.

Sparks is a father of five who exercises for 90 minutes a day, trains his beloved working dog and coaches the local track team. Once Sparks has a story in mind, he writes 2,000 words a day, three or four days a week, from 9:30 to 3:30, with lots of breaks and time for lunch.
Having read his novels—some of them told from a female perspective—fans can’t believe he’s not a woman. “It makes me feel good that I’m capturing a female’s voice and thoughts fairly accurately,” he says.

But there’s a logic to Sparks’ system, too. In each book he tries to differ slightly the demographics of the characters, their circumstances and the note on which the story will end. In Nights in Rodanthe, he sets up a love story between two recently separated baby boomers trapped in a romantic seaside B&B during a hurricane
His next one better: Cyrus’ adult career could be riding on it. But don’t worry, Disney. “I got it perfect in my head,” he says. “It’s just a matter of putting it down on paper.”
_Ellen McCarthy