THIS IS NOT MY WRITING MANIFESTO

Honestly, I don’t write manifestos. I’m not sure I’ve actually ever even read a manifesto. In fact, I can’t help feeling that when someone sits down and writes a manifesto, that’s when we need to call in the men in white coats. Authors of manifestos are calling out for help, and we should be making sure they get the help they need before the cult is gathered at the End of Times.

What makes this not a manifesto is that this is for and about me, and me alone. These are not instructions for how you must live your life or conduct your writing career, but how I plan to conduct my own writing career from here on, based on my personal experiences over a few decades of ups and downs, successes and failures, and so on and suchlike. No invitation to move to an intentional community will follow. You’re going to have to write a non-manifesto of your own.

So this is not my writing manifesto, even if it might seem like one:

From now on—however long that is for me—I will only write what I want to write and I will write it only in the way I want to write it. I will not be making commercial decisions when it comes to my own writing. If it gets published, hooray. If not, shrug. I will protect my copyrights and trademarks. I will expect to get paid by people and organizations who should be paying me. But when I sit down to write it will be by me, for me. Readers are invited and appreciated, but otherwise optional.

Lest you think, uh oh…

…I take full ownership of my long history with and continued love of pulp fiction in all its glorious incarnations. This is not me saying that from now on I fold myself into the literati and will henceforth only be Mr. Artsy Fartsy. I’m the guy who wrote a novelization of a video game I never even played. Actually, two of those. I collect and read Perry Rhodan and Doc Savage books and that’s not going to stop. I also used to be quasi-punk rock zine guy. Editor and publisher of Alternative fiction & poetry. Outsider poet. Then I was RPG freelancer, then D&D insider, then writing coach and freelance editor… None of that is being erased, and the last two are continuing apace.

But after leaving Wizards of the Coast I started doing a lot of thinking—I kinda had no choice. And then I started doing a lot of scrabbling around trying to figure out how to make a living in the “jobless recovery” following the Depression of 2007+. I wrote a novel I thought would be “commercial.” It was rejected by everyone except a small press who picked it up then dropped it. Then I dropped it. Then I thought about going back and revising it, but never worked up the energy to do that because it was fun and it’s fine, and there’s some good ideas in there and I’m not embarrassed by it, but in the end, if you have any piece of writing you can’t really be bothered to pick up again, well, listen to yourself and move on. Yeah?

Then I started putting together notes and multiple outlines for a dark fantasy thing that, maybe… could it be fifteen years later?… I have a rough first chapter of.

Well, that’s me telling myself I really don’t actually want to write that, yeah? I mean, I know how. I’ve finished novels. On deadline and otherwise.

Then in 2015 I sort of sat down with myself and thought back on those heady times of outsider poet, underground publisher Phil, and though looking back on that work is… Well, it was a look back at a much younger me—but it was me. And that got me wondering what present day me might look like. Not punk rock anything or outsider or tortured artist me, but me, me. Older, more experienced, strangely less jaded…

And that’s when I started writing again. I made the decision, eyes wide open, to start writing what I want to write, when I want to write it, and if it gets published, hooray. If not… whatever. I started writing short stories again. I started writing poetry again. And started getting it published, too. And each one of those publications—in tiny magazines you’ve never heard of—was a pure delight to me.

Now, please don’t think that this is in any form a repudiation of any of the other things I’ve written. I’m immensely proud of work like Annihilation and the Watercourse Trilogy, and all the work I did with an amazing group of people at TSR and Wizards of the Coast. Likewise, this isn’t me swearing off genre fiction. I might actually write that dark fantasy. There’s this dungeon crawl idea I can’t shake. I don’t want to die never having written a sword and planet novel. And lots and lots of horror.

I have no interest in erasing any part of my past—even if I could. This is about moving forward from here, based on the last nine years of writing without the pressure of commercial acceptance. Unless you’re a songwriter you don’t get rich writing poetry, but I’m tumbling toward age sixty and “getting rich” hasn’t felt at all important for a while now. I love what I do for a living and the people I’m privileged to work with. That’s not going to stop, and it has been and will continue to be how I pay the bills.

The writing, though—my writing—that will stay my own. It will be what I want it to be. There might not be lots and lots of it. After serious thought and the last nine years of actually doing it, I guess I’ve decided to be more like Harlan Ellison and less like (early) Robert Silverberg.

This is not my plan for the future. This is what I’m doing right now, and have been doing for nine years.

This is not my writing manifesto.

—Philip Athans

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Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model.

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