Earlier we talked a bit about the completion of the morbidly long fantasy series The Wheel of Time. Today, Stephen Moss writes about newly discovered unfinished works by the late Michael Crichton. The publishers wants to get those babies finished up, but Moss argues against that.

Leave his work be: publish it as he left it, and let Crichton fans try to work out his intentions for themselves. The urge to complete – exemplified by the numerous attempts to conclude Charles Dickens’ unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood – is based on a misconception: that only a finished work is of interest. The reverse is true: unfinished works are often the most interesting of all.

Any one here read C.S. Lewis’ unfinished works, The Dark Tower and After Ten Years? As we all know, if Lewis did it, then it’s been done right.

Lars isn’t the only one reading proofs lately. Author A.L. Kennedy writes about reading through the proofs of her new short story collection. Proofs, she says, “are also a source of almost primal panic for the writer.”

If your proofs are awful, wrong, badly-spelled, oddly-italicised and otherwise dysfunctional, they are a very real demonstration of both your complete powerlessness within the editing process and your witless lack of talent within the writing process. They alarm, containing, as they do, all manner of peculiarities and absurdities which have been added by strangers for no clear reason, along with the plethora of screw-ups which are utterly your own fault. How did you miss that non-agreeing verb? Did you ever know what this final sentence means?