The best thing about writing fiction is that moment where the story catches fire and comes to life on the page, and suddenly it all makes sense and you know what its about and why you’re doing it and what these people are saying and doing, and you get to feel like both the creator and the audience. Everything is suddenly both obvious and surprising … and it’s magic and wonderful and strange.
– Neil Gaiman
Tag: Neil Gaiman
Quotable 286
Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.
– Neil Gaiman
Pen to Paper: Literary Estate
Let’s start the new year by talking about our wills.
Now, now. Don’t give me that look. I am reliably informed that we’ve all got to go sometime. And we’re all leaving a lot of detritus behind us that we owe the courtesy of helping to clean up. In the last few years, I’ve seen firsthand what happens when one does and when one doesn’t leave a will. You’re being unkind to your next of kin if you don’t.
But whatever you decide to do about Great Aunt Nellie’s smoked-glass candy dish, let’s focus on what we creative types might do with our intellectual property rights. It is my understanding (lawyers, jump in and correct me if necessary) that IP rights don’t automatically accompany an estate. So all those poems and songs you wrote? The novel you self-published? The twenty years worth of plays you wrote for the local theater? If you don’t specify in your will who gets the rights to those, no one gets them.
Copyright law, at present (until The Mouse gets it extended yet again), says a creative work is copyrighted at the moment of creation and for seventy years after the creator’s death (longer in some cases). For seventy years, no one has the right to use or republish your work. How well-remembered do you expect to be after seven decades?
People who earned their daily bread and fed their families with their creative works have not given thought to this dilemma. Back in October 2006, Neil Gaiman wrote with a heavy heart about his friend John M. Ford, an author of no small note, who had died without making final arrangements for his literary estate. And another writer whose not-quite-ex-wife ended up with his copyrights, to everyone’s detriment. Gaiman and a lawyer friend offer a short and sweet solution in that post, so go check it out.
I’m a little past a half century. I’m hoping for another thirty years or so, but I’m working on documenting things like I’ve got until late next week. Just to be polite. It’s pretty easy, really, except for what to do with my little literary estate, most of which can be found on this site. It isn’t much, but I’m fairly proud of what I have done. I had once thought of just releasing the copyrights upon my death, but I’m not so sure about that now. On the off chance that something I’ve done could, in fact, become popular, why should some schmuck I never knew get comfortably well off from it? But I doubt that any of my relatives would want to fuss with my writing. So I’m a bit stuck at the moment.
So, to the comments! What provisions have you made for your literary estate?
Quotable 229
It’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.
– Neil Gaiman
Quotable 184
Fiction is dangerous because it shows you that the world doesn’t have to be like the one you live in.
– Neil Gaiman
Quotable 71
If you accept – and I do – that freedom of speech is important, then you are going to have to defend the indefensible. That means you are going to be defending the right of people to read, or to write, or to say, what you don’t say or like or want said.
– Neil Gaiman
Quotable 67
The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like.
– Neil Gaiman
Pen to Paper: Generating Ideas
Where do you get your ideas?
That’s a popular question to ask writers. Some, weary of answering, claim to have hired a service to send ten or fifteen a week. Harlan Ellison famously answered: “Schenectady.”
I can track down the inspiration for some of my stories; others surprise me as much as, if not more than, they do the reader. Some quick examples for ones I know about: