You Can Judge a "Writer" by His Cover

When I was a kid, right next to our house there was a patch of desert shrubs with wild butterflies flitting through it. I'd head out with the other kids in the neighborhood, glass jar in hand, and we'd try to catch them. The challenge was to chase one down and grab it in a way that it couldn't slip out of your hand and escape, while at the same time holding it inside your fist gently enough that you didn't crush it and end its life. Then you'd lower it slowly into the jar and seal the lid.

Honestly, I have no idea why we used to do this strange little activity, or why we harmed those fragile creatures. But what I do know is that this activity looks a lot like what we do every day as creatives. Ideas are always hiding, hovering in the air around us, and we run after them and try to catch them no matter how much they resist. We write them down so they can't fly away, we wrestle them into shape, and we seal them shut with a headline and a killer tagline.

In the middle of all that running, in order to corner a great idea and hold onto it, coming up with a "headline" matters enormously. Whether that headline is a campaign name or a written slogan for the idea, its importance isn't in the headline itself but in the fact that it is the jar we trap ideas in and seal shut. A headline isn't just a linguistic mix of clever, pretty words that happens to land in your lap. It isn't a shot fired by no one, dropped in to fill a gap. It's the distillation of your thinking process, your conclusions, your insight, and an attempt to summarize your strategic and creative direction in a clear, short, easy-to-grasp piece of language.

I was talking with Hassan the other day and he told me that headline writing is the creative writer's craft, the art that looks easy and isn't. Because an article, a campaign, an ad is usually "known by its title." It's the door and the entrance to the idea, and at the same time it's the closing line and the way out of it. A headline creates curiosity, or condenses everything you're trying to say. A headline is like the idea of bayt al-qaseed in poetry: it impresses you, gives you the essence, or saves you a whole lot of explaining.

The challenge of landing a great headline is that you're compressing long documents, brainstorm sessions and an entire story into two or three words. And you feel the power of headlines every time an advertising season wraps up, when you catch yourself remembering campaigns and films and searching for them by the headlines you loved and memorized: "Our Homeland, Their Homeland," "A Homeland You Dream In," "The Legend of a Delivery Guy," "Got a Hobby, Got a Story," "Ninja Doesn't Deliver, Ninja Brings," "An Egg Ad," and others.

You can arrive at a headline through proverbs, for example. Or pull it from the way people actually talk, their everyday expressions. And sometimes you land on a brand-new combination of words that nobody got to before you. The main thing is that you take care of it and really turn it over in your head as you shape it, so that creativity always has a headline.