Ask writers what they are hoping to achieve with their work — answering the ‘why do you do it?’ question — and many will say it’s because they want to leave a legacy. But what does that mean exactly — and how pertinent an aspiration is it especially when you consider that, once they’ve died, the writer has no control over how visible their ‘legacy’ is? Van Gogh, for example, can have no possible idea as to how revered his art is now (that super Matt Smith Dr. Who episode notwithstanding…)
Legacy: something that is a part of your history or that remains from an earlier time - Cambridge dictionary (on-line)
I suspect that’s how most people interpret legacy, the leaving something behind: something tangible; something unique to them; something which proves they existed. (The ‘your’ in the definition is doing a lot of the heavy-lifting.) Not that any of us will care after all the lights have gone out, of course — but that (and the throwaway comment about Van Gogh above) is probably a whole other debate!
If we leave to one side all the attendant and largely unavoidable appendages of being human — relationships, loves & loses, exceptional events, and so forth — a writer’s creative legacy is likely to consist of one or more of the following:
having written something original and therefore unique to them;
having catalogued their life experience in memoir and autobiography;
having had a demonstrable effect on the people who have read their work;
having had some kind of positive effect on other writers through writing-related activities.
So in essence, legacy is achieved either through the written work (the first three), or via ancillary experiences (the last one). Some writers won’t care in the slightest about some of these, of course; indeed, they may assert that they’re only writing for themselves and that legacy is something for others to worry about. An argument which may or may not be just a little bit disingenuous…
But let’s consider our little bookshelf of ‘whys’?
1 - Original and unique
Assuming that you haven’t cheated by using Artificial Intelligence in any part of the creative process, as soon as you finish a piece of creative writing — of any genre or flavour — then surely you have met the first criteria. [I’m asserting here that any use of AI in terms of idea generation, drafting, or even ‘tidying up’, disqualifies all claims you may have for the work to be ‘yours’.]
But if you’ve only written one thing? Unless you want to get into an unwinnable debate about it, logically the volume of work you have produced doesn’t come into it; surely from the perspective of legacy, one valid piece or a hundred valid pieces makes little difference. I would argue that Barbara Cartland’s legacy (723 books published in her lifetime!) is no greater than that of James Joyce’s (who only wrote four major works) if you were looking at it from a volume perspective. Indeed, it is highly likely that you would take other things into consideration if you wanted to compare apples with pears and ‘grade’ legacy. I suspect the majority would argue that Joyce’s is the greater.
The bottom-line is that as soon as you’ve written something you are leaving a legacy of some kind — that of producing an artefact entirely unique to you — whether legacy’s important to you or not.
2 - The life experience (aka “I woz ‘ere”)
Producing one or more pieces of creative writing also demonstrates that you existed, of course — but potentially in this context the statement you are making is nothing other than a generic one. For many writers, their drive is to explicitly elaborate on the life they lived and the experiences they had; indeed, where this is paramount often the writing itself is oddly secondary, little more than the vehicle which carries the burden of proof. I once belonged to a writing group where one of its members was constantly — and only — writing about her past life. She had no interest in editing or honing her writing, so consequently the quality of what she produced was variable; her driver was to produce documents of record — quality could go hang.
Memoir and autobiography are legacy’s lifeblood here, but we would be mistaken for assuming they are the sole means of proving existence. A writer, by taking their personal experiences and replaying or re-engineering them in the form of poems or fictions, is also validating their existence: “I lived my life doing x, y or z, and because of that I am able to write a, b or c.” I have a poem about Singapore which I could never have written had I not lived there for six months. Thus, the legacy of our lived experience is manifest either ‘first hand’ — in the form of memoir or autobiography — or ‘second hand’, through the trials and tribulations of a writer’s puppet characters.
3 - The impact of their writing
Whichever of the above two drivers above provide the fuel for your writing (if at all), there will be those who choose to measure or value their work — and hence its legacy — through the effect it has on its readers. But how do you measure that? Well, it’s easier than you might think: reviews and sales would seem the most self-evident barometers — given you can’t get inside someone else’s head to know how they truly feel. In many ways, ‘moving’ a reader is perhaps the highest compliment that can be paid to any writer. Inspiring someone — such that they volunteer to report that you have done so, or they prove how much they value your work by going out and buying everything you’ve ever written — is surely the acme in terms of achievement. I have just checked my sales figures for the first half of 2026, and while they are not vast, they are spread across my entire catalogue, so I must be doing something right! [A reader telling me that one of my novels “made her cry on the subject” is, in many respects, the highest compliment (and therefore proof of legacy) I’ve ever had.]
Can you choose to have ‘proof of impact’ as the single element which will define your legacy? I’m not so sure. Given that you’ll also have qualified for the two previous legacy strands above in one way or another, then I doubt one can genuinely say that ‘proof of impact’ is the only form of legacy in which you are interested and which proves your ‘value’ to future generations.
4 - The impact of the writer as writer
The final component of legacy considered here is the impact made by the writer as an individual and not via their creative work. By this I mean through undertaking related activities like running writing groups, mentoring other writers, running courses etc. In order to ‘qualify’ to do those things you need to have the credentials in place — ‘proof of the pudding’ — which, when evidenced by output, will check-off at least one of the other three legacy strands we’ve already considered.
Interestingly, it is entirely feasible for this kind of legacy to be the most rewarding for a writer. I have always enjoyed the buzz I get from mentoring at public writers’ retreats, running groups, and — through my Coverstory books imprint — helping people bring their books into the world (and where they might not otherwise have been able to do so). That is a feeling like no other. I am proud to be able to use the skills I have acquired to help others.
There are those who migrate into this kind of realm as a full-time career; their writing has opened the door and now they have become something else on the back of that.
Perhaps it is not too fanciful to suggest that the first two threads of legacy as outlined above are all about the writer, whereas the last two are about those who interact with either us or our work. A simplistic categorisation, but surely not an unreasonable one.
From my own perspective, I honestly don’t believe I have ever been specifically motivated by ‘legacy’ as my main driver; I have never answered the question ‘why do I write?’ with the answer ‘in order to leave a legacy’. Having said that, the way my career has panned out — is panning out! — it’s impossible not to leave something behind, of course; and if have managed put a tick against each of the four legacy streams above, how do I feel about that?
Generally okay of course — and not a little proud of my achievements across the board. It would be easy to indulge in egregious trumpet-blowing at this point, but, at the end of the day, legacy — from my perspective, at least — is a specious or vacuous notion. Yes, I will be grateful to have left something of myself behind, but given I won’t know about it, won’t see it ‘realised’, then why should I care that much? Maybe a person’s legacy is more important to those they leave behind; is that the ultimate truth here?
The unavoidable imperative, however, is the recognition that what should matter to me — and what should matter to all of us — is what we do while the lights are still on…
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Something I found myself wondering while reading was where imagination or world-building fits into this. It surely contributes to whether a writer’s work feels “original and unique,” but it also shapes “the impact of their writing.” Do you see imagination as straddling several of these categories rather than belonging to just one?
Also interesting to think about how literary legacies aren’t necessarily fixed. They’re subject to fashion and time. Kipling, for example, has long been read through a lens of empire, but the way readers judge that inheritance has shifted.