The Altar or the Whip

~ on writing that sells vs. writing that saves ~

The Writer Who Died

My life as a writer began like most things in a capitalist society do:

Whipped into action out of necessity.

I quit slinging Starbucks lattes in 2016 to chase my dream of building an online fitness business. I wanted freedom, and personal training was all I felt I had to offer. I had no backup plan, a loving and supportive girlfriend who I didn’t communicate my vision to anywhere near well enough as she deserved, $1000 in savings, and the borderline-delusional belief that I’d make things work.

To get clients, I started blogging while learning how to market myself. That’s when I stumbled into copywriting, into the quicksand of direct-response marketing.

Suddenly, I was whipping readers into action with urgency, pouring salt into their open wounds, and offering salvation before they even realized they were drowning.

Which worked. My business grew month after month after month. I wasn’t making megabucks, but I began feeling stable and secure—and confident I could earn more.

That was my first positive association with urgency-rooted writing.

Then something curious happened: other fitness coaches took notice. They liked my writing. They liked my growth. They started asking me to write their copy too. What began as a side hustle soon grew to eclipse my fitness coaching revenue entirely.

When the time came to choose one path or the other, I chose copywriting.

In my first full-time month as a freelance copywriter, I made over $10,000.

Cue my second positive association: the whip pays well.

Over the next seven years, I carved out a living by writing words that sold. Some months I earned twenty grand, others four or five. But I didn’t care about the swings. I had my coveted freedom of time, location, and money. I had autonomy.

Kind of, that is. Most of my big money months came when running The Wizards of Wordcraft, which had writers, tech, and tools to pay. I grew this business in ways I didn’t need to, that weren’t aligned, and that cost me dearly in many ways.

For one, unease haunted me.

I’d never meant to stay here. Copywriting was supposed to be a stepping stone, not my final destination. I’d known fitness wasn’t forever, and neither was this. But I didn’t know where to step next, and I couldn’t slow down enough to find the path.

Every email, every launch sequence, every sales letter kept me writing fast, swinging hard, cracking the whip until my fingers bled ink and my spirit wept poisoned blood.

I became creatively bankrupt, energetically frayed, and spiritually hollowed.

And the worst part? I didn’t even realize what was happening.

I wrote from morning ‘till night. Always selling. Always persuading.

Even when I tried adding elements of art or poetry or softness, the tension of a desired outcome lingered. I wasn’t writing to connect, I was writing to convert.

Eventually, my soul began throwing bricks through the windows of my ambition. The wind that came in was warm at first, even soothing, but soon turned frigid and dark.

There was a quiet despair living in my eyes, a sad sinking in my being whenever I opened a Google Doc, knowing full well I’d fill it, not from love, but from obligation.

I felt something dying.

I was dying.

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The Whip

In the quicksand of direct-response marketing, I was exposed to the default motivational writing style—which sounds lovely, but is a salacious devil charming you with skin and a smile while fingering a poison-laced blade meant for your heart.

No word of a lie, motivational writing does feel electric. You get to say derivatives of “just do it!” and “no excuses!” and “discipline over desire!” and people clap like mad.

You might feel powerful. Potent. Purposeful. Important.

But what hides beneath the surface is this truth:

Motivational writing runs on borrowed fire.

You siphon urgency from your audience’s pain. You dangle transformation like barbequed meat in front of starving dogs. You bang the call-to-action war drums like they’re the only exit from a burning building you built just for the occasion.

Your body tenses. Your heart clenches.

You start mistaking pressure for power, volume for voice, adrenaline for aliveness.

At least that’s what happened to me.

I convinced myself I was helping people. In some ways, I was. But I was also learning to slice my truth into saleable parts. I was weaponizing language to trigger, tease, persuade, and push. To make people move at my command. How fucking draining.

Even when I wrote with care, even when I loved the people I wrote for, I could still feel the cost of always cracking the whip, always urging., always selling.

Eventually, I didn’t know how to write without an underlying agenda.

And that, I now realize, was the beginning of the end.

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The Writer Who Lived

I didn’t plan to start writing again. I even wondered if I’d ever been one at all.

(Which cut me deeply, and was awfully disorienting for a time.)

But wandering the streets of Lisbon in 2024, something cracked me open.

Could have been my morning ritual of wandering to a cafe for espresso, sparkling water, orange juice, and a cherry berliner (the local doughnut varietal).

Or discovering a day-night cafe that made burgers so delicious I ate there three days in a row, including having seconds one night while catching up with a friend.

I also saw a black cat or three, and you never know what magic they might weave.

Whatever the case, I wandered. I sipped. I noticed things. I fed.

I let Lisbon kiss my feet and slake my thirst for tiny, winding, cobblestone streets.

Some mornings, the streets seemed to hum with ancient wisdom, guiding my feet more than I was. I was taken up, down, all around. I walked across the city to revisit a lunch spot I’d been delighted by earlier in the week. Espresso carried me through the days. Ginja (a yummy cherry liqueur, the local alcohol specialty) wound me down.

And for no reason at all, I started writing again.

Small things, strange things, sultry things. A line here. A musing there. Sentences that didn’t go anywhere but made me grin. Ideas of ideas. I wrote with no plan, no goal. I was writing because I began feeling inspired, called to the pen once again.

Then came the Whimsies, appearing like a surprise side next to my burgers and fries.

My strange little missives. Shards of story. Scraps of soul. Little inky spells. I didn’t start writing them for anyone. I wrote them because I wanted to. Because when I’m writing, I feel more myself. More alive. My blood hums in the coziest of ways.

Ideas started bubbling up and wouldn’t let me rest until I poured them out. Lovely, interesting, gentle ideas that didn’t ask me to be useful or insist on selling.

They asked me to just do the thing I loved again. To make. To play. To create.

So I did.

And for some crazy reason, many of the people who I’d written to over the years about fitness and copywriting kept reading. The response was gentle, but warm. I assume because I didn’t write to convert them, but to connect.

And I wrote to connect not as a brand, but as a human. A thump-thumping heart. A weirdo with a glittery pen, ink made from shadows, and a slowly-cracking-open chest.

After years of absence, writing again, for me, felt like being kissed by a god I’d long since forgotten. I wasn’t writing from adrenaline or for survival anymore. I was writing from pulse and presence. From somewhere deep and quiet and mine.

Which is when I realized:

The writer in me hadn’t died, but gone into hiding.

Waiting for me to put down the whip and kneel at the altar.

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The Altar

In alchemizing deep emotional wounds, curiously, my writing voice evolved.

And during the revolution, I discovered there’s a different kind of writing. A kind of writing I’d never known existed, but had still gravitated towards. I’d look into the shadows with ache and longing, then turn my back to crack the whip some more.

This new kind of writing doesn’t chase, doesn’t push, doesn’t say “act or die.”

Instead, this kind of writing waits, listens, invites.

I wasn’t selling anymore.

I was summoning.

Which rearranged and revitalized my spiritual code.

My friend, welcome to devotional writing.

Born not from urgency, but from stillness. From noticing. From deep attention. From a place where what’s aligned and true takes precedence over what converts.

Where beauty matters and stillness is celebrated.

Where your own heart has to break a little, or what’s the point.

Or as Neil Gaiman once said:

“The moment you feel that, just maybe, you’re walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.”

That’s how I know I’m on the right path now. Publishing this? Or How I Became My Own Muse? Terrifying. But I have to let all this out, for my own sake.

Devotional writing crept into the room once I stopped trying to impress; once I stopped cracking the whip; once I remembered that my words aren’t just tools.

My words are offerings: tiny altars made of breath, blood, and glitter.

Sometimes they come as Whimsies. Sometimes as spells dressed as stories or songs. Sometimes as letters I never send. Sometimes as scribbles in my journal’s margins.

I’m not trying to get somewhere specific anymore. I’m not aiming to win. I’m simply bowing at the feet of something deeper than me. This approach is indubitably slower, softer, but far more alive. At least for me. And that matters most of all.

But don’t mistake softness for smallness, invitation for timidness.

Devotional writing sells, but differently.

Not by triggering fear, but by telling the truth.

Not by extracting pain, but by awakening desire.

Not by pushing urgency, but by striking resonance.

Not by performing perfection, but by baring your spirit.

When you write from heart over head, poetry over pressure, beauty over performance, the right people lean in. The right clients say yes. The right readers stay…

And the whip collects dust.

With love from the fog,

~ Alexander, Creator of Emberbrook

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