"The people who don't like it tend to dislike it intensely. That's unfortunate, but not surprising when one deliberately goes against audience expectations"
About this Quote
Ford is diagnosing a particular kind of backlash: the rage that shows up when an audience feels a work has broken an unspoken contract. He isn’t begging for understanding or retreating into the artist’s cliché of being “misunderstood.” He’s colder than that, almost managerial. If you set out to violate expectations, you don’t get to act shocked when some people take it personally. Intense dislike, in this frame, isn’t evidence the work “failed”; it’s a predictable byproduct of the design.
The line quietly separates two kinds of dissatisfaction. There’s the mild shrug - “not for me” - and then there’s the scorched-earth response that comes from feeling tricked. Ford’s “deliberately” is doing the heavy lifting: this isn’t an accidental mismatch between creator and audience, it’s a choice. That choice can be aesthetically brave or strategically foolish, but it’s never neutral. By naming it, he’s stripping away the romantic alibi that innovation is always greeted by philistines.
Context matters here because Ford wrote in genres (science fiction, fantasy) where reader expectation is both a comfort and a map. Fans come for certain pleasures: coherence, payoff, tone, the promise that the story’s rules will hold. When a writer swerves, the audience doesn’t just evaluate the work - they evaluate the writer’s intention. The subtext is almost a warning to fellow artists: transgression isn’t just an artistic move; it’s a social one. You’re not only changing the story. You’re changing the relationship.
The line quietly separates two kinds of dissatisfaction. There’s the mild shrug - “not for me” - and then there’s the scorched-earth response that comes from feeling tricked. Ford’s “deliberately” is doing the heavy lifting: this isn’t an accidental mismatch between creator and audience, it’s a choice. That choice can be aesthetically brave or strategically foolish, but it’s never neutral. By naming it, he’s stripping away the romantic alibi that innovation is always greeted by philistines.
Context matters here because Ford wrote in genres (science fiction, fantasy) where reader expectation is both a comfort and a map. Fans come for certain pleasures: coherence, payoff, tone, the promise that the story’s rules will hold. When a writer swerves, the audience doesn’t just evaluate the work - they evaluate the writer’s intention. The subtext is almost a warning to fellow artists: transgression isn’t just an artistic move; it’s a social one. You’re not only changing the story. You’re changing the relationship.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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