Puzzle makers lay out a path for solvers to follow.

Top constructors use varied approaches to create fun challenges

2020-04-26 - By Joshua Kosman

There’s an old joke among crossword constructors that the most common question they usually get asked is, “Which comes first, the grid or the clues?” The answer is the grid, because you can’t start writing clues until you know what words you’re dealing with.

But beyond that common starting point, the range of approaches is as multifarious as in any other creative endeavor. Some constructors start with a clever theme, a piece of wordplay that the rest of the puzzle then has to fit around like ivy on a trellis. Some shoot for an overall mood, a quasiliterary tone that is analogous to the distinctive feel of a writer’s voice.

And some, like Natan Last — one of the stable of constructors whose stylish creations have helped turn the New Yorker’s puzzle page into a destination for solvers — come to the task with no expectations at all.

“Each time I start a puzzle, it’s like I’m breaking open a box of Legos,” he says. “You never know what you have to work with or what might be possible.”

The 29yearold is an immigration rights advocate pursuing a graduate degree at Columbia University. He began, like most puzzlers, solving the New York Times puzzle, which he says he still likes to solve. But construction, particularly socalled “freestyle” or themeless puzzles, has taken over his focus.

“For me, the creative aspect comes first,” he says. “With freestyle, I think of it as a kind of curation — putting together interesting words in a kitchensink arrangement that includes interesting vocabulary words, colloquialisms and anything else I can squeeze in.”

For San Francisco constructor Andrea Carla Michaels, 60, puzzles serve mostly as a vehicle for clever themes — the kind of punning wordplay that form the staple of the easier crosswords that run in the Times toward the beginning of each week.

“I always viewed myself mostly as a solver,” she says. “Then one day in 2000, I got an idea for a puzzle built around earthquake puns. I called Will Shortz, whom I knew from my years working at Games Magazine, and he said, ‘Why don’t you turn it into a puzzle?’ ”

Since then, Michaels has been a prolific Times contributor, mostly with accessible Monday puzzles.

She’s also made a specialty of collaborating with and mentoring younger constructors, particularly women.

“There are a lot of people whose dream is to get a puzzle into the New York Times. Firsttimers account for more than half my collaborations,” she says.

Michaels doesn’t have much interest in filling the grids themselves, but for some constructors — like Anna Shechtman, a New Yorker regular — that’s where the artistry lives. “When you start making a puzzle, the idea is to first make the grid as elegant and aesthetically pleasing as you can,” says Shechtman, 29, an editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books with a newly minted English lit doctorate from Yale. “You try to find words that are timely, that you’d never expect to see in a puzzle, or that fill you with joy.”

After that, writing the clues is more onerous. “How do I come up with a new clue for the word ‘love’? Those are the times when I feel like I’m back working on my dissertation.” For years, constructors habitually built crosswords by hand, testing out entries in pencil on graph paper and erasing endlessly. But when constructing software became widely available around the turn of the century, everything changed. Now puzzle makers could test out thousands of possibilities within seconds and build more intricately interlocked grids with great

er ease. Shechtman was a holdout, continuing to use paper and pencil long after software tools had become standard, but even she has come around at last.

Thomas Snyder, 40, a San Bruno research scientist, has become renowned in the puzzle world for his elegant sudoku creations, which apply an artisanal touch to a form that is generally massproduced by computer. It helps that he’s a threetime world and U.S. sudoku champion, because he approaches the task with a solver’s mindset.

“I think of constructing any kind of logic puzzle as if I’m solving a puzzle that no one has made yet,” Snyder says. “That way you embed a particular path that you want your solvers to follow.”

Sudoku, which in its basic form requires a solver to fill a 9by9 grid with digits according to certain constraints, became popular in Japan in the 1980s before experiencing a worldwide boom in the first decade of this century. Along with its countless variants and hybrid forms, sudoku is one of a range of logicbased puzzles that Snyder refers to as “languageneutral.” The full variety, each with its own set of solving rules, can be found at his website, Grandmaster Puzzles.

For Evan Birnholz, who in 2015, at 32 years old, succeeded the legendary late constructor Merl Reagle as the author of the Washington Post’s Sunday puzzle, the task is to come up with a theme each week that can support the expansive real estate of a grid that is nearly twice the size of a daily puzzle.

“Generating the theme is always the hardest part of this job,” he says. “That can take me a couple of days. Then filling the grid can take 12 hours for a simple grid, or much longer if there are a lot of constraints.

“I’m very particular about what goes into the grid. Sometimes I will spend a couple of hours working on just one corner until I’m satisfied with it.”

Birnholz, now 36, was working toward a doctorate in American history at Temple University when he had his first puzzle published in the New York Times. “My professors were fascinated, although one of them said very pointedly, ‘That’s an interesting hobby. But it’s just a hobby, right?' And then that hobby turned into something bigger.”

It’s an undertaking, Birnholz says, that has the capacity to be something a little more for people.

“It’s sort of a cliche, but there is an opportunity for crosswords to change the world a little bit at a time,” he says. “Even if all you’re doing is giving people a way to pass the time, the pleasure they get from a piece of clever wordplay, or by finding an answer that gives them an aha! moment — that pleasure is very real. And I think it’s something people all over the world really cherish.”