Creative leads can draw on word play, but the goal is to suggest more than one meaning and intrigue the reader.

When the world closes in on you and your head feels a size too small, what you need is a piece of mind.

That lead is from Mademoiselle magazine in December 1993.

Ordinarily slang terms are avoided in mass media writing, but creative leads allows the writer to slip one in on occasion as this writer did:

Those clever Brits–they’ve discovered that having a belt or two everyday can increase your resistance to the sniffles.

The Williamsport Sun-Gazette carried the following lead from the Associated Press wire service using vernacular February 3, 1995.

In the City of Brotherly Love, even dead men can get ripped off.

The same paper that same day, carried this lead about feuding elected officials:

The Lycoming County commissioners are acting like a dysfunctional family.

Word play relies on clever use of words that suggest the theme. An article on meals could use a food term such as the verb “cook” as the writer did in this USA Today lead February 6, 1995.

Taco Bell has cooked up a new menu that could change the way fast food is sold.

Even without this special brand of word play, strong verbs can make an opening sentence sparkle as the writer did in this March 1995 lead in Sassy.

Claire Danes was just about to tell me the wildest thing she’s done lately when her car phone crackles, sputters and dies.

Perhaps the master publication of creative leads is USA Today, the pioneer of the short, breezy article topped off with a pithy lead. Note the lean but creative words in the following six-word lead from September 12, 1994.

NBC could get a second parent.

Here is another creative lead.

Foreign food marketers are gobbling up U.S. food and beverage markets–again.–USA Today, September 10, 1993

This is an excerpt from Dr. Michael Ray Smith’s book FeatureWriting.net. Used with permission.

Download the entire book for free from our MTI Online resource center.