Brevity is not only kind to the solver but to the editor as well, with line length and spacing at issue in both print and electronic formats. Extraneous ideas can work against clarity and brevity. You are telling a little story, in some ways, but try to stick to essential elements. Go for streamlined elegance in both wording and concept. Rule of thumb: You want your sense of fun to emerge, but in a tidy package. By the time you get to Saturday, it might feel as if you are in a battle of wits with the devil himself, and be careful that you don’t get your eyebrows singed!īut I digress … this puzzle’s theme is clever but straightforward. Robyn, what is in the forefront of your mind when you sit down to clue?Įveryone loves a good snuggle, but there’s not much challenge there. Editors and solvers will remember your name if you can consistently produce fresh and detail-oriented sets of clues. Robyn and I are here to encourage you to keep inspiration flowing all the way to a finished puzzle manuscript. WILBER: For some, cluing can feel anticlimactic after the euphoria of wrestling all those letters into submission … er, position. The other side of the coin is learning how the clue vibe differs at various publishing venues, and then it’s a matter of adapting your style to each “editorial happy place.” How one clues a New York Times puzzle, for example, may be very different from how one clues a puzzle for USA Today or the American Values Club crossword. Of course, your choices will be inherently different from each of our choices, and that’s how your particular aesthetic will shine through to the solver. Many things contribute to your cluing style: The degree to which you balance basic definition clues, wordplay-based clues, general knowledge clues, in addition to sprinkling in humor and slang. In Part 3, Paolo Pasco mentioned that the grid fill can be a window into your personality as a constructor. We have great material to work with and we’re excited to get started! ROBYN WEINTRAUB and BRAD WILBER: Well, we’re at an exciting part of this Wordplay series: writing the clues. In the daily Wordplay column and other articles, clues have historically been presented in quotation marks.Īnd we’re not done yet: Part 5, running in August, will wrap things up with a list of the resources mentioned in this series, as well as a look at the puzzle by the crossword editors Will Shortz and Joel Fagliano, who will give us insight into how they take a submitted puzzle from raw manuscript to published puzzle. Wilber place their clues in brackets because that’s how clues are often presented to editors in queries or when discussing them with other constructors. The article would go on forever if they took us through the process for every single clue in the puzzle, so they will talk about a selection of clues, starting with the theme entries, and the rest of the puzzle clues - as well as the puzzle itself for you to solve - are at the end. DEB AMLEN: The creation of our crossword puzzle is in the homestretch! Thanks to the hard work of the constructors who are making the time to pull back the curtain on this art form, we now have a theme ( Part 1), a grid ( Part 2) and a whole lot of letters for solvers to fill into the empty squares ( Part 3).īut you can’t fill anything in without clues, can you? Robyn Weintraub and Brad Wilber, two well-known New York Times Crossword constructors, take us through that final part of the process in Part 4.
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