Kristian Bush Quotes

If you're not connected emotionally to a story, then you're dead. You're really just opening the door for people to lose interest and their minds to wander, for them to start picking it apart.

Big stories need human stakes.

To be completely honest, I just like whatever tells a good story. Put me in whatever setting, scenario, genre. If you're telling a good story, it's great and it's fun to get caught up in.

If you don't have something that glues the audience to the screen, you're in trouble.

If you have great characters, then your reader becomes emotionally invested in those people.

A lot of actors look at scripts and think, 'How will this stretch me as an actor?' But I always thought, 'Do I want to turn the page? Is this going to make people laugh?'

If the reader doesn't care or relate to the characters, all that visual spectacle is pretty but feels empty.

Audiences are just like us as writers - we grow attached to characters. In certain ways you don't want them to change.

People are interested if you tell stories well and relevantly.

It's all still about having a good story. You have to have a good story as your anchor, as your main focus. So for me, personally, I just like to concentrate on writing the best book I can, and if there's other stuff that goes along with it, that's awesome, as long as the story is central.

No one reads to hear someone complain about the weather or how poorly their children are behaving. You have to give the readers a reason to turn the page. As a writer you have to invite someone to turn the page. And that is a skill you have to refine. That is why you have to read. You have to read to learn what it is that makes people turn the page.

When I write songs I write for myself...I'm writing it as a form of expression, and hoping to find an audience, an audience that responds to music that is honest and lyrical and tells stories.

I still think that of all the people doing top fiction today, John D. MacDonald is the best.He was my model as a kid. If there are people out there that want to write, all you need to do is read 20 of his stories to get an idea what it takes to make a story kick over.

When I'm writing about complicated subjects, it usually involves a world. It could be the world of Scientology or the world of Al Qaeda, or the world of counter-terrorism.I look for emblematic beasts of burden - what I call "donkeys" - who can carry the reader through this world. They serve a different purpose. Donkeys are not especially interesting or likeable, but they are serviceable. They will take you into this world. The distinction I'm trying to make is: It's not about them. It's about the world.

Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story... To make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all.

Everything you could want - action, suspense, character and setting, all floating on the easy lyricism of a fine writer at the top of his game.

It is not usually possible in a poem or a story to make the relationship between particular and universal fully explicit. Those who try to do so end up writing parables.

My goal was just to tell the unlikely story in a way that would feel as convincing as possible.

Kids, if anything, are harder to write for because they are a more discerning audience. They will not stay with you if you go off on a tangent or if you give them extraneous information that doesn't serve the story. You really have to tell a tight story. You have to give them humor and suspense and believable characters. All those things that adults want too, but you have to be really on your game when you're writing for kids.

Writing, for me, is a combination of objective and subjective approach. You take an objective approach at times to get you through things, and you take a subjective approach at other times, and that allows you to find an emotional experience for the audience.

Basically it takes me very little time to write a song. If I find myself taking more than an hour to do it I usually forget it, and try something else. I like to work quickly; I never like to waste any time. I never write half a song and come back to it later at all. It all has to be done at once. I lose interest if it doesn't.

For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.

I try not to write songs. I would rather emote them, and I found myself going back to my room every night while on my trip, just pouring out new songs and new stories about what I was seeing, what I was feeling.

In this world that we live in we have originality in literature, but we also have TV and movies. I write love stories. I could never write a love story based on the Titanic - that was never a novel. If I see an idea that's been done in film, I try to avoid that.

The craft, the writing of a song, is about creating a story, a life story, a world within three minutes, but that's the frame, if you like, the picture frame. That fascinates me.