A few weeks ago the Record-Eagle ran a feature piece about a class being offered at Northwestern Michigan College called “The Art of Crossword Construction.”
Well, crossword puzzles and I go back a long way. Solving crossword puzzles has been a staple in my toolbox for as long as I’ve needed self entertainment tools. So no surprise then that I couldn’t resist signing up.
As the class concludes this week I can happily tell you that I can’t ever remember getting more bang for my tuition buck. NMC instructor Kelly Richardson combined to provide this late-in-life learner with both an experience to savor and quality tools to use for the rest of my puzzling life.
Crosswords have intrigued me from the start. Something about the challenge of the solve and the stimulation of the wordplay has always captivated my mind, satisfied my soul and as intended, entertained the wandering mind of a curious kid. The class of a dozen other folks looking to upgrade their cruciverbalist skills made it apparent that I was not the only one hooked on crosswords.
Crossword puzzles tend to come a couple of different ways, themed and themeless. They can be any number of sizes but the sizes we built were a 15-by-15 puzzle that the class collaborated on and 9-by-9 that we tackled individually.
Once a size has been selected, constructors then create their “grids” — the strategic placing of theme or “seed” words along with the black blocks. Grids, we learned, are typically symmetrical in that they can be rotated around themselves and retain their configuration. Gridding involves fitting your original theme words, keeping symmetry, maintaining proper flow and, if I had any, pulling hair to make the framework for the rest of the puzzles, “fill.” I found this step of crossword constructing to be the most challenging, by far.
If you’ve never built a crossword puzzle you might think that finding the words that perfectly mesh amongst each other would be the hardest part. Well, if you remove the word “perfectly” you’d be incorrect because, like many other things in the modern world, there is a computer algorithm that helps create “fill.” That’s right, get your theme words in place, manufacture a grid work that touches all the bases, and then consult “auto fill.” Accessing large data bases of words and phrases, a computer program is available to fill in the blanks.
Lest you worry that technology has overly pervaded yet another corner of modern society, in the realm of crossword puzzle construction there is plenty of room for the creative mind. Yes, the available computer program helps tremendously, but the puzzles that you see in newspapers were probably pored over by their constructors for many painstaking hours making sure words and clues were just how they wanted them.
As a writer that shares opposite sides of the same section in the Record-Eagle as the New York Times Sunday Crossword, I was curious as to compensation. Kelly assured me that crossword puzzle construction pays much better than “journalism. Full disclosure: Kelly has provided puzzles to papers including the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and writes a Record-Eagle column and stories that run about every other month. That puzzles pay more should come as no surprise considering the popularity of working a crossword compared to reading any particular column, including this one.
I doubt that my name will ever appear as a puzzle contributor, but with huge thanks to NMC and Kelly Richardson I have a newfound appreciation for those that do.