Yes, I know, some folks like to eat it. I prefer to think of henbit as a yet another weed that needs to be removed from my vegetables, and fed to the chickens. I'd been at it for a couple of hours wdhen I'd spotted this weed. During that time, I became more and more disturbed by the pervasiveness of the weeds.
This particular piece of henbit was so large, and encroaching on my garlic, that I wondered how I hadn't seen it first.
Then I recalled the first ad I ever wrote.
After I read the creative brief (which I helped write - but that's another story for another time), I began work on the project with headlines.
I first wrote the most obvious and on-the-nose headline I could imagine, "We sell insurance and investment products, and you should buy them from us."
I started with the obvious, because it focused my attention on what the ad needed to convey. It was a conscious effort to reduce the creative brief into something more the length of a haiku. Plus, I knew it could only get better.
Then I started writing more headlines.
And more headlines.
Page after page of headlines on my legal pad. And I had a whiteboard filled with words that struck a nerve with me.
Most of them were awful. Just limp, little, half-formed ideas begging to be tossed in the waste.
So I started weeding. Pulling and cutting and getting rid of the ones that were just taking up space and getting in the way.
After the weeding, I had to plant. So I wrote more headlines.
Another page on the pad filled quickly.
As I wrote, I kept weeding until I had a dozen or so headlines that I thought were worth sharing with my Art Director partner. (Yes boys and girls, back in those days there were still copywriter/art director teams.)
When I showed him what I had, he looked at the one I had written at the top of my pad, and said, "That's brilliant. Why'd you bother writing more?"
The reality was, that I'd written that particular headline as one of the last ones. I just happened to like it so I wrote it at the top of a new page on my pad before showing him. Sure, I'd written a few more after; however, it was hardly the first one I wrote, regardless of how it must have appeared when I handed him a notepad with that headline at the top.
Just like the henbit that perturbed me, the headline we settled on to pitch to the client wasn't the first one. It just became more and more obvious as I weeded a lot of others out of the way.
I didn't stop at one ugly headline, any more than I'd stop after pulling one ugly weed.
I kept working until I'd found something worth writing.
The weeds will always return. There will always be more for me to yank, and feed to the chickens or toss into the compost bin.
And I'll be there, just as I was when trying to write that first ad.
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