Words were the Copywriter’s domain. Sacred territory. Each sentence a small kingdom to rule over, to populate with just the right citizens: nouns sturdy enough to bear weight, verbs that danced rather than shuffled, adjectives used sparingly like expensive spices. The Copywriter built worlds in inches—one hundred years of company legacy squeezed into a rectangle on the back of a potato chip bag, the entire human emotional spectrum distilled into thirty seconds of voiceover for dish soap.
Pride came in strange packages: a client who didn’t change a single word, an account manager’s grudging nod, the secret thrill when someone actually read the fine print that had taken three days to perfect. Small victories. Invisible triumphs.
The world spun on outside.
Technology marched forward, relentless and indifferent. First came the endless blogs, then social media’s character limits and emoji shorthand. Language compressed, contracted, collapsed in on itself. Readers became viewers. Paragraphs became bullet points. Bullet points became infographics.
“We’re pivoting to video,” said the Creative Director on a Tuesday morning, not meeting the Copywriter’s eyes.
“Content needs to be snackable,” explained the Strategy Director on a Wednesday afternoon.
“People just don’t read anymore,” sighed the Client on a Thursday call.
The Copywriter’s kingdom shrank—from pages to paragraphs to sentences to words. Then finally to letters, mere suggestions, afterthoughts tacked onto the bottom of glittering motion graphics and autoplay videos. TL;DR became not just an acronym but a philosophy, a worldview, a declaration of surrender.
The warning signs were everywhere. The Copywriter just chose not to read them.
It happened on an ordinary Monday. The Copywriter arrived at work to find a sleek black box humming on what had previously been the intern’s desk. Its surface gleamed with the same self-satisfaction as the Account Director’s new Tesla.
“This is ALX-9000,” announced the Innovation Officer, patting the machine with inappropriate affection. “Artificial Language Experience. It can generate copy for any brief in under three seconds, with customizable tone of voice settings and built-in SEO optimization.”
“It also doesn’t need health insurance,” whispered the Office Manager later by the coffee machine, her eyes full of apology.
The Copywriter nodded, smiled thinly, returned to the desk where half-finished taglines for a bathroom cleaner lay abandoned. The words seemed suddenly childish, embarrassingly human. Too many adverbs. Excessive punctuation. The machine would never make such mistakes.
Two weeks later, the Copywriter cleared out the desk drawer, collecting fifteen years of accumulated paper clips and dried-out highlighters, a small fortune in stolen Post-it notes, and a desktop plaque that read “I’m silently correcting your grammar.” The Human Resources Manager used words like “changing landscape” and “operational efficiencies” and “industry disruption,” all while the severance package sat between them like a murder weapon at a crime scene.
The ALX-9000 hummed from across the room, generating seventeen options for the bathroom cleaner tagline in the time it took the Copywriter to sign the final page.
Empty days followed. The Copywriter’s apartment took on the quiet solemnity of a library after closing. Morning coffee stretched into afternoon tea stretched into evening whiskey. Applications went unsent. Phone calls went unreturned. The cursor on the blank document blinked with accusatory persistence.
“You should write something,” suggested Prose one evening over drinks. Prose, who wrote novels thick as bricks, who spoke of character arcs and narrative tension, who had once been a colleague before becoming a friend. “Anything. For yourself.”
The Copywriter scoffed, swirling amber liquid around an ice cube. “Write what? About what? For whom?”
“For yourself,” Prose repeated, leaning forward. “The words you’ve written—all those millions of words—they’ve always belonged to someone else. Products. Companies. Campaigns. What would your words look like if they belonged only to you?”
The question lingered like smoke, impossible to grasp yet impossible to wave away.
Later that night, staring at the empty screen, the Copywriter’s fingers trembled slightly over the keys. Without a brief, without parameters, without a brand voice guide or a word count limit, what remained? The blinking cursor pulsed like a challenge.
The blank page—so familiar yet so foreign when it belonged to no one else. The freedom was terrifying, bottomless. The Copywriter had spent decades finding the perfect words to sell toothpaste and credit cards and luxury sedans, but had never once considered what words might be worth keeping for oneself.
“Write what you know,” Prose had said, quoting the oldest advice in the book.
But what did the Copywriter know, really? How to make people want things. How to make ordinary objects seem magical. How to tell stories about mundane products as if they contained the secrets of the universe.
Perhaps that was enough.
The Copywriter began to type.
Not about doorknobs or potato chips or bathroom cleaner, but about a world where words still mattered. About the strange alchemy of language, how twenty-six letters could rearrange themselves into combinations that made people laugh or cry or reach for their wallets. About the sacredness of a well-placed semicolon, the savage joy of cutting an unnecessary adverb, the quiet triumph of the perfect metaphor.
Words flowed like water—sometimes a trickle, sometimes a flood. Without client feedback or revision rounds, the Copywriter wrote with abandon, slinging sentences across the page with the reckless joy of graffiti artists tagging an empty wall. Some days brought doubt. Some days brought delete keys and crumpled drafts. But the words kept coming, answering a call the Copywriter hadn’t known was being broadcast.
“What are you writing?” Prose asked one afternoon, peering over reading glasses at the Copywriter’s laptop screen.
“A story,” said the Copywriter with surprise, as if just realizing it. “About the last person who cared about words in a world that stopped reading.”
“Sounds meta,” said Prose with a smile.
“It’s autobiographical fiction,” corrected the Copywriter, the term appearing fully formed from some forgotten writing workshop. “Or maybe it’s just therapy.”
“Same thing.” said Prose, patting the writer on the shoulder and leaving him to his work.
Months passed. Seasons changed. The story grew, not outward but inward—deeper, stranger, more true. The Copywriter wrote of machines that could generate perfect paragraphs but couldn’t feel the weight of them. Of a society that consumed images but starved for meaning. Of the small, quiet revolution of putting one word after another with care and intention.
When it was finished—though nothing is ever truly finished, only abandoned, as the Copywriter had once read—it sat complete on the screen. Not a novel thick as a brick, but not a tagline either. Something in between. Something honest.
“Will anyone read it?” the Copywriter asked Prose over celebration drinks.
Prose shrugged, raising a glass. “Does it matter? You wrote it for yourself, remember?”
But the Copywriter had spent too many decades considering audiences to stop now. “I think I want someone to read it.”
“Then someone will,” said Prose with the confidence of one who believed in things like fate and purpose. “The right words always find the right readers eventually.”
The Copywriter wasn’t sure about that. The world moved so quickly now, so hungrily, always devouring the new and forgetting yesterday’s feast. But perhaps somewhere, someone might still sit with a story, might still savor the taste of well-chosen words on their mental tongue, might still appreciate the craftsmanship of a sentence built not to sell but to illuminate.
It was enough to hope, anyway. Enough to send the story out into the world like a message in a bottle, cast into digital seas.
The cursor blinked on a new, blank document. The Copywriter’s fingers hovered over the keys, no longer trembling.
What next?
Anything.
Everything.
The Copywriter began to type.