I’m a Writer, Not a Marketer
The other morning I woke up with the word “plinth” in my head. I couldn’t remember the dream, but the word hung at the front of my consciousness for several minutes. “What a great word,” I thought. The plosivness of the first letter followed quickly by the satisfying conclusion of the fricative. Curious, I looked up its origins — Latin and Greek from a word meaning “tile, brick, or squared stone.” The similarity to the “lith” sound, so common in English today — monolith, Neolithic, etc. — was a clue as to its flinty history.
I like words — I like the way how they connect us with our human ancestors across time, the way they sound and feel in the mouth, how skillfully mixing and matching not only creates meaning but can do so in a way that is pleasing to the eye and ear. I became a writer so I could spend my days in the company of words.
However, I wanted to earn a living that would support a certain lifestyle, so after a pretty good few years in which I made a name for myself in local journalism, I abandoned it. As much as I loved it, it had just become too difficult to find a stable job that paid a decent salary, and even harder to cobble together enough freelance work to support myself. And so I entered the wonderful world of content marketing.
Content marketing is a nice niche for ex-journalists because it lets us use a lot of the same skills we honed contributing to magazines and newspapers. Researching, conducting interviews, constructing a narrative, adapting for different formats and audiences, and writing in an engaging manner that pulls the reader along. The difference is that our writing is ultimately being used to sell a product or a service.
I am not so precious (or wealthy!) that I have qualms about using my talents for nakedly commercial purposes. As Samuel Johnson famously said, “Only a fool writes for anything but money.” The only thing I don’t like about content marketing is the slew of other things I’m supposed to care about — SEO, analytics, ROI, conversion rates, and a bunch of other industry jargon. I’m happy to adapt my writing to meet those needs and to keep up with a basic understanding of marketing tools and trends — but if I’m being honest, those things give me the willies.
That’s because I’m a writer at heart, not a marketer. I understand marketing is useful, and that it offers its own satisfactions to its practitioners. It’s just that I’m really only interested in the parts of marketing that involve putting words together.
I like to create sentences that flow to become articles, posts, and white papers that inform readers and tick off a punchlist of client requirements while also, just maybe, occasionally delighting a reader with a particularly elegant turn of phrase or a funny metaphor. “I get bored reading a lot of marketing writing,” a client once told me. “But never while reading your work.”
Are there writers who are also marketers? Absolutely! But it isn’t an apples-to-apples field. Some people are writers and content strategists. Some are writers and SEO specialists. Some, like me, are writers with just enough knowledge of marketing trends and best practices to tweak our skills to suit clients’ needs. There’s room for all of us in the industry.
I may not find a way to incorporate the word “plinth” into a corporate blog post or have many opportunities to construct a sentence in a white paper that makes people cry. I’ll leave that for my personal pursuits. But in the meantime, I will continue to gain satisfaction from creating new meanings from old words, sentence by sentence, each assignment a new challenge to be puzzled over and solved.
