Legacy
I wonder what will become of my writing. So far I have written three novels, about a dozen or so short stories, two short film scripts, probably around over thirty comic scripts, one webcomic with over a dozen page scripts, twenty three poems of varying length, two reference essays; not to mention the other stuff I haven’t finished, tens of thousands of words of novel type, a few short stories only half constructed, scripts that fade to black long before any credits are due.
If you printed off everything I have written, much of which I have, you’d have quite a mighty stack of paper. So, what will become of it?
Will everything I have ever written, words I have slaved over, characters I have birthed through notes, thoughts, stories and idea, be lost forever? What if it all gets thrown away when I die? Some strange person cleans out my house and dumps all of the paper from my office into a hopper bin, or an incinerator. What if it never gets read again? It’ll be like it never existed.
What if my children, or grandchildren, simply toss it out with the weekly scraps, tired of carting around Papa Lindsay’s old work with them when it is useless? What if it’s never appreciated again, never looked upon, or heaven forbid, studied again? It’ll be like I wasted my time.
I like to think of two other scenarios.
In the future, when I pass on an old and dusty fella who’s had a great crack at life and spent the last decade being a silver tongued devil who looked at the girls but could only ever charm my way into their ears anymore, I’d like my lawyer to settle my estate. In doing so he’ll pass on the passwords to all my old online accounts and a new world will open up for my children, or grandchildren. They’ll open up my Google Docs account and warm themselves by the light of my prose, forever protected in the online realms. They’ll take their time downloading each document and reading it, maybe even printing it off, and enjoying it because it was their blood that created it. Wouldn’t that be cool? In a very twentieth century way.
Or;
My grandchildren will be tooling around in the attic of their parents house, chasing dust bunnies and playing imaginary games of fight the monster and hide from the evil all-seeing eye (I assume that my creativity will be passed along down the line along with my thick black-haired chest) and then these kids, maybe aged around 8-12, will stumble across an old trunk. A trunk that belonged to my father, their grandfather, and was a century old when I got it, so bloody dusty as hell when they crack it yet still in great shape because, boys and girls, they truly never made them again like they once did, and inside will be reams of hardened paper upon which my words live and breathe still. They’ll wipe their eyes from the dusty smell coming out but then they’ll be enraptured by their discovery. They know the name, Ryan K Lindsay, they link the dusty smell with my house that they visit sometimes in the winter. Their fingers will rifle through the pages and work out it’s all stories. They’ll grab a story each and venture downstairs, grab a drink and then go sit in a spot where there’s some sun and some breeze, and they’ll read my writing. They may even like it, but mostly they’ll just like to read something that was written by a family member. The thrill of finding old letters and postcards has nothing on finding an old unpublished novel. They’ll ask me about it the next time they see me, if I’m still alive.
I wonder what will happen to my writing, often I wonder, but mostly I hope more about what will happen to it. I hope and I smile.
Posted on October 19th, 2009 by ryan
Filed under: Writing
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