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Mental Floss published a real howler of an article explaining how to make crosswords last week. The number of dubious claims and/or outright falsehoods should have sent this write up to the dustbin, but alas, it’s out there. Let’s review:
Constructing a crossword puzzle is an art form. There’s plenty of erasing, coming up with acronyms, and more erasing.
Yes, it is an art form, but how much erasing is really done nowadays anyway? Most puzzles are made using software, Crossword Compiler and Crossfire being the two most popular formats. Also, there is no call for acronyms unless you have to put in legitimate answers that are already acronyms in your grid (like EPA, NRA, ETC, etc.).
The New York Times, uses a 15×15 grid for their daily crossword puzzle. That means each row is 15 squares across and 15 squares down. So start there and use this size for practice.
A 15x is a daily size, true, but I’d recommend doing something much smaller for your first grid. 9×9 should suffice.
Next, you want to gather a list of words. Depending on level of difficulty, you might want your words to be short and easy or the kind of words you need a Ph.D. in English to know. If a holiday is near or if you know a lot about a certain subject, go with a theme.
Actually, most puzzles are made up entirely of common everyday words and phrases. The difficulty is almost always with the cluing, and hardly the fill. Material that only Ph.Ds are expected to know is highly frowned upon. If you absolutely must use an obscurity to make your grid work, you have to make sure the crossings are all common and fair
And, frankly, the first step in making a puzzle is to come up with a fun, inventive theme. Filling a grid in comes much later, let alone compiling a word list.
The New York Times’ crossword editor Will Shortz—the only person in the world who has a degree in the study of puzzles (called enigmatology) and who has pored over hundreds of submitted puzzles since joining the Times in ’93—recently gave Business Insider a peek into how he creates his highly esteemed crosswords. Mr. Shortz’s advice: “You want to come up with an idea that’s fresh, interesting, fun, and then you want to fill the grid with as good, interesting, lively, juicy, colorful vocabulary you can.”
Finally something legitimate about how puzzles are made. Fitting that it comes from the mouth of a professional puzzle maker. Though, it wouldn’t be a howler of an article if there wasn’t a misprint in there. Will has probably pored over hundreds of puzzles last week. Hundreds of thousands (or more) since 1993.
Now it’s time to lay those words out on your grid. For words that won’t possibly intersect, scrap them and come up with new ones. Once everything is laid out, black out the remaining squares.
Hoo boy. You have to design the black square pattern, first, before filling it in. Also, there are many rules to follow. The grid must have 180 degree symmetry, full interlock, and no words shorter than three letters. Oh, and the grid cannot exceed about 38 black squares.
Finish by numbering the starting square for each word and coming up with clues for each. Be cheeky, but don’t lead your solvers astray. (Most would follow that “used to clean between one’s teeth” is supposed to be “floss.” “Of the mint variety” might be too hard.)
This paragraph demonstrates the rookie mistake of how clues are written. Both of those example clues are terrible. The clue and answer must agree, that is to say, if the answers an adjective, the clue must be an adjective as well. So the first clue, since it is trying to be noun, should have been something like {Medicine cabinet item}, or {Tool used in teeth cleaning}. The second clue is a trainwreck because presumably the author thought he’d be “cheeky” and ask the solver to make two leaps of faith. “Of” signals an adjective, the answer is a noun (strike one). “the mint variety” hopelessly attempts to signal that there’s a mint variety of dental floss (strike two). I’m not going to even bother to salvage that clue and just come up with a better example: {Line in the bathroom?}
Well, nice attempt, Mental Floss. A bit more effort on the author’s part could have resulted in a better article, like, you know, actually talking to more professional puzzle makers. But it looks like since they’re willing to run articles like that, may I make a pitch about one explaining the God Particle? I have no experience in high levels of physics so presumably, that’s qualifies me to write for Mental Floss.
Share the puzzle. New one on Thursday.
mental_floss appears to have canned their terrible article, but luckily Google remembers what they wrote. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://mentalfloss.com/article/58528/how-crossword-puzzle-made
Wow! What a terrible article.
I’m only surprised (well, maybe not necessary in this venue) that you didn’t comment on the phrase in the fourth quoted paragraph, “how he creates his highly esteemed crosswords,” (emphasis added) as if the Times crosswords were not the product of hundreds of constructors!
I dunno, I actually learned a few things in the article. Like the fact that “each row is 15 squares across and 15 squares down.” In all my years of puzzle solving, I had never realized that there were 225 squares per row.