Remain: A Supernatural Love Story
Remain: A Supernatural Love Story
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Nicholas Sparks on Remain: A Supernatural Love Story
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
Two pitches, one house in Bucks CountyThe collaboration began not with a creative impulse but with a logistical arrangement: both men’s teams brokered a meeting at Shyamalan’s home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in May 2023, and each was told to arrive with an original story that could serve both a novel and a film. Sparks came prepared with his own concept. Shyamalan’s won the room.
My team said, ‘Hey, look, you’re going to have a meeting, and your goal for that meeting is to come up with an original story that would work for both you and M. Night Shyamalan.’
After that May 2023 meeting, fourteen months passed with no word. When Shyamalan finally called in August 2024, he told Sparks the project would be his next film, which meant he would write it, direct it, and produce it. That single piece of information turned what Sparks had imagined as a possible novella into a full novel.
As soon as I knew it was going to be his next movie, I said, OK, I guess I’m going to write a novel.
Sparks traces a longer prehistory to the pairing, one he says he didn’t know about until recently. During the late 1990s, before either man had any awareness of the other’s work, their careers had already brushed against each other in a way that was only legible in retrospect.
Back in the 90s, when they’re doing the script for The Notebook, one of the writers they approached to adapt The Notebook for screen, M. Night Shyamalan. And you know why he couldn’t do it? Because he was doing The Sixth Sense. [paraphrased from audio]
Sparks had also slipped a deliberate nod to Shyamalan into Safe Haven years earlier, hiding a secondary character whose reality the reader never fully confirms. The two had been orbiting each other’s work for decades before anyone made an introduction.
How he wrote it
Starting over the day the script arrivedSparks received Shyamalan’s completed screenplay on October 12, 2024. His admiration for it was immediate. So was his recognition that it could not become a novel without being rebuilt from the ground up, and he articulates with precision exactly what the script was missing for a prose reader.
This is amazing. It’s going to be a great movie, but it won’t work as a book. This just isn’t going to work. The structure’s all off. There’s no explanation. I’ve got no backstory. You don’t know what any of these characters are thinking.
He started rewriting from scratch that same day, finished the first draft on January 29, 2025, and edited through April. The finished novel shares its concept with the film but was not derived from it.
The reason a screenplay cannot simply be novelized is something Sparks thinks about as a first principle. Film and prose each have structural advantages the other cannot replicate, and the gap runs in both directions.
I often say that a novel is a story told with words and a film is a story told with images and pictures. And you can do some things great in a book, and they just don’t work in a movie. And vice versa. [paraphrased from audio]
Writing a ghost story specifically for the page required solving a problem that film sidesteps. In cinema, an audience arrives already prepared to accept the supernatural on screen. Sparks found that prose fiction offers no equivalent free pass, and so he built his answer into the novel’s architecture.
When you see a ghost in a film, the audience is already willing to suspend disbelief. In a novel, that’s not true. I felt it was really important to answer the question, why Tate? If you have a haunted house but only one person sees the ghosts, why him? It deserved a valid answer. Also, one of my pet peeves when reading ghost stories is that the author doesn’t earn the reader’s right to disbelieve. You just accept it. For me, I want that right earned.
One of the novel’s central structural choices was getting inside the perspective of Wren, the female lead, in a way the film could not replicate. The decision shaped the emotional core of the book and was something only prose made possible.
This novel’s really going to work if I can get into Ren’s head. I got to get into Ren’s head to really make the readers care about this particular character, which you can do in the novel, but not the film. [paraphrased from audio]
Sparks is precise about what kind of object the novel is in relation to Shyamalan’s film. During production, the actors were forbidden from reading the manuscript, and Sparks gave Jake Gyllenhaal a copy only on the shoot’s final day. The relationship between the two works is something he had to find a new vocabulary to describe.
Is it an adaptation? Is it a companion? Is it a novelization? No, it’s none of those... What you have to imagine is that we conceived the story together. And then he went and did it as a movie. I went and did it as a book. [...] Same story, different mediums. You know, two sides of the same coin, basically.
The personal thread
Flickering lights and an unresolved explanationSparks’s Catholicism shapes how he handles the afterlife in his fiction: he believes in heaven, prays daily, and considers faith essential to his work. On ghosts he says he is a little fuzzier, partly because of something that happened at a friend’s house that he has never fully explained to himself.
I’m one of those believers who believe love and tragedy go hand-in-hand. If there’s no great love, there’s no great tragedy. The greater the love, the greater the tragedy when that love is lost, through death, distance or separation.
At the home of a friend, Sparks saw lights flickering at the edge of his vision and his then-wife was woken by the sound of drums that seemed to move each time she walked toward them. The strangeness stopped after the friend returned a gifted artifact to its place of origin. Sparks has never settled on an explanation, and the unresolved quality of that experience is exactly the territory Tate, the novel’s protagonist, inhabits.
Maybe I was over-tired. At the same time, it could have been imagination.
Sparks notes that Tate deals with exactly that kind of uncertainty: the gap between a rational account and the stubborn sense that something else was present.
What he wants us to sit with
Love as the only answer that holdsThe theme Sparks describes as the engine of the novel is one he connects directly to his collaboration with Shyamalan, not just to his own body of work. He traces it to conversations the two had about what the story was actually for.
In the end, it’s a love story. It’s a story about how love can save two people, one at a time, and how only love can save them. That was the theme Night and I worked with.
In a PBS interview, Sparks pushed that claim further, connecting the novel’s emotional argument to something he holds as a general conviction rather than a plot device.
I really wanted to explore the theme that Night and I really harped on. And that’s really that love is sometimes the only thing that can save us, right, in moments of whatever we’re going through... all the good stuff in life and in the world come from love, right?
Remain is a deliberate detour in Sparks’s career. He set aside a manuscript called Forever Garden, a love story set in North Carolina, to write it. After finishing the draft he returned to that work. The supernatural, for him, is not where he lives. It was a vehicle for a question he has been asking in every book he has written.