The Will of the Artist Vs. The Want of the People

An interesting story popped up last night. @s0u1 and @winstonalden both wrote about author Terry Pratchett, who died in 2015 from complications due to Alzheimer's.

@s0u1's article: https://steemit.com/news/@s0u1/hard-disc-with-10-of-terry-pratchett-s-unfinished-novels-crushed

@winstonalden's article: https://steemit.com/books/@winstonalden/10-unfinished-works-by-terry-pratchett-crushed

As a writer, he had something like 10 unfinished books on a hard drive that was to be destroyed upon his death, which he expressly wrote in his will.

@s0u1 said: "It's fantastic they followed his request. But, they could have finished the novels and made a lot of money to help in the fight against Alzheimer's."

And that's certainly valid. For someone who was as apparently as popular as Pratchett was, book sales from those unfinished, unpublished works could have raised a not-insignificant amount of money on behalf of Alzheimer's research. As someone whose grandfather died from complications due to Parkinson's, I totally get it. We never want to see our loved ones (or anyone else) go through that kind of debilitating disease. It's brutal to watch and I imagine it's brutal to experience. The altruism there IS important.

But...does that altruism supersede the will of the artist? And this is where @s0u1 and I diverge on this topic, which is fine. And let me be clear, I'm not calling him out or trying to paint him as a terrible person, only that we disagree on this particular point. Also, I think he's just a super-huge fan of Pratchett's writing, which is totally fine as well.

I think what bothers me most about the exchange is the phrase "he would never know how they turned out."

Well, sure...he's dead. But that's not really the point, is it?

Artists are, by and large, weird creatures. No matter the medium, we have a particular love for each piece that we create. We often know the impetus for the creation, what caused us to start them or what inspired us to begin them. In many ways, the objects we create (whether they be a piece of music, a piece of writing, a sculpture, an oil painting, whatever)...those objects are our children.

We birth them, we nurture them into something more, we cultivate them into something larger until finally, they reach a point where they cannot be any more perfect than what they are, at least in our eyes. I've had stories that have taken me several years to finish and I've had stories that I've started and finished within two hours; no matter on which end of the spectrum those stories sit, they are still mine and they are nobody else's.

So I have a serious issue with the idea that people believe once an artist is dead that the artist's entire oeuvre is fair game for public consumption, regardless of what they state in their will. Sure, we've had plenty of amazing literature come to light after a writer has passed, but we've also seen plenty of really mediocre (and honestly awful) results from someone picking up the mantle and finishing someone else's work.

This is a timely subject as I'm currently reading "The Girl in the Spider's Web," the fourth book in the Lisbeth Salander series first started by Stieg Larsson ("The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"). While many of the characters are the same and the locale is the same and it's the same kind of thriller as the previous books, it's simply NOT Stieg Larsson at the helm of his own creation. The book does not read the same. In fact, it kind of drags on and on in many places in ways the first three books did not.

This is all to say: if the artist has created something and put it out into the world, it's fair game. At that point, it's fair game to criticism and to praise, to dissection and to imitation. But it should only be released into the world according to the artist's standards and absolutely no one else's.

Will we end up losing some great literature or art because of this? Probably. But it's not like you knew they existed in the first place, so what did YOU really lose anyway?

Nothing.