You’re a creative who doesn’t care about details like balancing a budget or keeping a calendar or writing a creative trust in your last will and testament. Except you do, deep down. You care about budgeting because you want to do this for a living for life and so you need to know how to underspend and oversave and reinvest your profits. You care about keeping a calendar because this life of making great art is INFINITELY more about the people you’re meeting and collaborating with and living through your work: the mermaid kings and wheat chewing turd farmers and bankrupt bankers— keeping your appointments keeps them in your care.

And you care — or ought to care — about making a creative trust in your last will and testament so that your family and friends know what to do with your million unpublished words or your ten recorded and unreleased albums or the first great American opera hiding under your mattress.

Except you don’t because you haven’t written a will yet. What do you care what happens to old ratty jeans and a toaster oven and that crumbling ticket to the night circus?

Have you heard about the truly great writer who divorced his wife, didn’t come up with an estate plan, and so his partner of twenty years got nothing? She’s destitute even though she lived with this writer for twenty years?

Or the painter who died in poverty and obscurity until his paintings were found and he became one of the most famous of all time? Only his family got nothing for it. His stuff is all in rich and powerful museums.

Or the musician whose discography is owned by another richer musician’s family.

Or the filmmaker whose films were stolen from his friends by a government.

The list goes on. The names are irrelevant because the most relevant name is yours. And you don’t have a will yet, do you? Or a creative trust, do you?

Shame on you for leaving your family and friends in this predicament.

“But Lance, I’m a nobody.”

Yeah you and Emily Dickenson. And Kierkegaard. And Van Gogh. I need not belabor the point:

There’s hope.

It’s really, really simple to make a creative trust in your last will and testament. I’m going to give you a two page document. You’re going to download it and fill it out with your own info and seal it. I’m borrowing this from Neil Gaiman’s site, since he’s the one who got me to fill mine out initially. His friend… well here’s what he said on his post in 2006:

Shortly after Mike Ford’s death, I spoke to Les Klinger about it. Les is a lawyer, and a very good one, and also an author. I met him through Michael Dirda, and the Baker Street Irregulars (here’s Les’s Sherlockian webpage).

Les immediately saw my point, understood my crusade and went off and made a document for authors. Especially the lazy sort of authors, or just the ones who haven’t quite got around to seeing a lawyer, or who figure that one day it’ll all sort itself out, or even the ones to whom it has never occurred that they need to think about this stuff.

It’s a PDF file, which you can, and should, if you’re a creative person, download here.

As Les says, your options are:

1) Recopy the document ENTIRELY by hand, date it, and sign it at the end. No witnesses required.

2) Type the document, date it, sign it IN FRONT OF at least two witnesses, who are not family or named in the Will, and have each witness sign IN FRONT OF YOU and the other witnesses. Better yet, go to a lawyer with this form and discuss your choices!

Having said that, the first option, a “holographic will” isn’t valid everywhere — according to Wikipedia, In the United States, unwitnessed holographic wills are valid in around 30 out of the 50 states. Jurisdictions that do not themselves recognize such holographic wills may nonetheless accept them under a “foreign wills act” if it was drafted in another jurisdiction in which it would be valid. In the United Kingdom, unwitnessed holographic wills are valid in Scotland, but not in England and Wales.

So the second option is by far the wisest.

And your friends and family will thank you when you die.

Featured download: template for your last will and testament.

And for the love of all that’s holy, share his with your creative friends – whether marginally creative or the CEO of Pixar – who haven’t done this yet either.