![]() "And the answer was 'bacon.'"įor Quigley, the goal is to make crossword puzzles that stymie the solver for justlong enough. It was, 'strips in a club,'" Quigley says. "One of my all-time favorite clues Mike Shenk wrote for The Wall Street Journal. ![]() Once you have your grid filled out, you can start writing entertaining clues - steering your solver back towards the puzzle’s theme, if need be. “We want to think of answers that will give us the most flexibility going down,” he says. Quigley says the easiest way to fill in a puzzle grid is to choose answers that follow the pattern of “vowel, consonant, vowel, consonant.” With your theme chosen, next up is slotting answers into your grid (which can be small for your first puzzle - Studio 360’s Kurt Andersen made one using a 4-inch by 4-inch grid). And really the hardest part of any puzzle is coming up with that gimmick.” “You want to find a new way to sort of play with the English language. "It could be something incredibly simple like a category, where you have a bunch of answers - say, answers that begin with parts of a bicycle, like 'chain of fools,' 'pedal pushers,' 'handlebar mustache,'" he says. You don’t need to overthink your theme, but you should have fun with it. He says the theme is the puzzle’s “calling card,” and links all the long answers in the grid. To set up your own crossword puzzle, Quigley suggests starting with a theme. (The answer to the colorful swallow clue, by the way, is "jello shot.") “You want to make things that look like verbs, actually are nouns and that sort of thing,” Quigley says. That makes him a "cruciverbalist" - and as he explains it, his job is to twist the mind of the crossword puzzle’s "solver." Quigley has been making crosswords for The New York Times for two decades, ever since he was a senior in college. What’s a nine-letter phrase for "colorful swallow?"īefore you hit the Audubon books, here’s another hint: “The English language is incredibly fluid,” says Brendan Emmett Quigley.
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