"I just wrote what I felt like writing since they seemed to sell"
About this Quote
There’s a shrug in this line that feels almost engineered: a working writer’s deadpan answer to the romance-industrial complex that insists art must arrive with a manifesto attached. Vance frames authorship as market weather, not moral mission. “I just wrote” strips the act down to labor; “what I felt like writing” restores impulse and taste; “since they seemed to sell” lands the punchline, the quiet admission that commerce is the ultimate editor.
The intent is evasive and revealing at once. It dodges the critic’s favorite question (What are you really trying to say?) by insisting on something embarrassingly practical: readers bought it, so he kept going. Yet the subtext isn’t crass opportunism. It’s a sly defense of craft and autonomy. Vance is saying he didn’t chase trends so much as notice, with professional clarity, that his natural mode had an audience. The “seemed” matters: it undercuts certainty, suggesting luck, timing, and the unpredictability of taste. He’s not claiming dominance; he’s acknowledging a feedback loop.
Context sharpens the edge. Vance worked in genres long treated as second-class by the literary establishment. For a science fiction and fantasy writer of his era, “seriousness” was often something gatekeepers withheld. This quote flips that hierarchy: the marketplace becomes a kind of validation, or at least a reality check, while critical pieties fade into background noise. It’s also a quiet rebuke to the myth of the tortured genius: sometimes the engine is pleasure plus paycheck, and the work still ends up strange, distinctive, and enduring.
The intent is evasive and revealing at once. It dodges the critic’s favorite question (What are you really trying to say?) by insisting on something embarrassingly practical: readers bought it, so he kept going. Yet the subtext isn’t crass opportunism. It’s a sly defense of craft and autonomy. Vance is saying he didn’t chase trends so much as notice, with professional clarity, that his natural mode had an audience. The “seemed” matters: it undercuts certainty, suggesting luck, timing, and the unpredictability of taste. He’s not claiming dominance; he’s acknowledging a feedback loop.
Context sharpens the edge. Vance worked in genres long treated as second-class by the literary establishment. For a science fiction and fantasy writer of his era, “seriousness” was often something gatekeepers withheld. This quote flips that hierarchy: the marketplace becomes a kind of validation, or at least a reality check, while critical pieties fade into background noise. It’s also a quiet rebuke to the myth of the tortured genius: sometimes the engine is pleasure plus paycheck, and the work still ends up strange, distinctive, and enduring.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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