And Gabby, inspired by a former assistant, was nothing like Allie. Travis, a character inspired by my brother (before he got married), was nothing at all like Noah Calhoun. Once I had those elements, however, I wanted to make the story as original as possible. But conceiving the idea in the first place is often a long journey of frustration. It’s always like that though: the idea, once expressed, seems obvious. And though I simply laid out my thoughts behind the novel in just a few preceding sentences, it took months to actually come up with the central thrust of the story. Close enough to feel superficially familiar, but different enough to feel completely unique. In The Choice, I decided to give Gabby a serious boyfriend, one whom she thought she would marry in the final section, Gabby was in a coma, and Travis wasn’t sure whether she would ever awaken.

With The Choice, I tried to parallel – not copy – those obstacles. In The Notebook, the “obstacle” that kept them apart was two-fold in the early story, it was Allie’s engagement to Lon in the final section, Alzheimer’s kept Allie from remembering Noah. The obstacle creates the tension and drama inherent in the story in many ways, it’s the glue that holds the entire story together. The Choice was the product of those efforts.Īgain, as with all my novels, one of the questions I must first answer when attempting to conceive of a story is the “obstacle” that keeps the characters apart. Still, there was something magical about the story, and after finishing Dear John, I set out with the hopes of capturing at least a bit of that magic once more, if only to show that I hadn’t forgotten why people began to read my novels in the first place. I’m proud of that novel for many different reasons, but that doesn’t mean that I fully accept the fact that I’ll never write a novel that becomes even more well-known. This doesn’t bother me at all, by the way. Nowadays, I’m fairly certain that when people look back on my career,The Notebook will always be first in the list of work for which I am most known.

With Cliffs Notes coming out on the novel in 2009, a case can even be made that it’s become something of a modern classic.

The notebook sparks