More About Giving Audiences What They Want: Great Quote

Church

I write in Don't Give Audiences What They Think They Want that authors run the risk of putting out stories with beloved tropes and then...ending up with dissatisfied audiences since viewers/readers want those tropes but they also want more.

(When Tolkien became hugely popular in America in the 1960s, a great many fantasy series by others followed. Some were quite good. Some...feel like a wizard, small person, dwarf, elf, and king were shaken up together in a bag!)

Scene from Murdoch Mysteries

I suggest that the best writers have a vision and that the best visions are by authors who love what they are writing. In American Visions by Robert Hughes, Hughes makes this point regarding painting and Frederick Edwin Church:

Like Dickens, indeed like any artist who becomes both great and popular, he hadn't reach this position [of being America's 'national artist'] by figuring out what the public wanted and then giving it to them. He wanted what the public wanted, and was rewarded by its unstinting gratitude.

Hollywood, like Google Search, often come across as unbearably cynical because they seem to think they have "figured out" the public. 

But only a willing member of the public can truly succeed at capturing a zeitgeist.