Let’s talk about fishing, shopping in Paris, or perhaps a holiday in the Greek Islands or a cruise.
We are going to need content.
Content is a group of words aimed at promotion, focusing on clarity and audience engagement. Ideally, it includes SEO-optimized language, leveraging a mix of keyword research, high-quality content creation, on-page optimization, technical improvements, backlinks, engine crawling, algorithms, indexing, ranking, and driving organic traffic.
Wow, oh my goodness, what is all that about? If you’re wondering, you’re not alone.
As writers, we rely on these aliens from planet SEO who know this speak, helping us market our precious work by building brand awareness, and hopefully sell more of our enriching and entertaining products.
Literature, on the other hand, represents a creative journey—a feeling, a memory. It’s about being held, dragged, tricked, surprised by a twist, or navigating multiple narrative perspectives. It features stories nested within other stories, with narrative techniques that add complexity, depth, and nuance. Literature challenges the reader’s perception of truth and reality.
Now we’re talking. This excites me; I’m fully engaged, this is my jam.
Let’s entertain, be artistic, explore uncharted waters, and plumb the depths of emotion and human experience. Let’s educate and preserve, all through our artfully written language.
Content serves the left hemisphere of the brain by helping, instructing, and guiding decisions. Literature is primarily enjoyed by the right hemisphere, which is attuned to feeling and experience.
Have you heard the saying “show, not tell”? It’s a great principle to keep in mind when writing.
To conclude, in crisp and concise terms: literature shows you all things, while content tells you all things. That’s how I see it, anyway.