Creative Constructing

I covered the traditional elements that make a crossword puzzle enjoyable in a previous post — fill, cluing, theme, and challenge — but I completely missed a wild card: novelty.

What could be novel in a crossword puzzle, you ask? Aren’t puzzles just a series of interlocking words and phrases?

Well, Patrick Merrill, an accomplished and very creative constructor, has brought yet another form of crossword novelty to the party in his Sunday-sized puzzle for the Scientific American magazine. It’s in the December issue, or you can link to it here and download the PDFs (two of them, one for the grid and one for the clues).

While it helps if you’re a regular reader of the magazine and know the year’s top science stories, the puzzle isn’t so difficult that everyone can’t enjoy it. Just click on the “Set Theory” graphic link, download the puzzle, and you’ll see what I mean.

What makes some puzzles better than others?

I was struck this weekend by the cleverness and sophistication of several crossword puzzles, and it got me to thinking about why some puzzles are so much more enjoyable to solve than others.

There are probably four dimensions on which you can judge a puzzle — and together they determine how much enjoyment and satisfaction they will provide.

1. First, there is the theme. If it’s clever, engaging, perhaps surprising, and novel, you’ll experience the satisfaction that comes with the “Aha!” experience of realization or discovery.
2. Then there’s the fill — the words that fit into the grid. If they’re the same old words, with the same “crossword-ese” flavor, you probably won’t enjoy the puzzle. But if they are fresh and show unusual connection with the common usage of our language, you’ll probably appreciate the time you spend interacting with the puzzle (and indirectly with the constructor and editor).
3. Third is cluing. The clues are what make a puzzle more or less difficult, and also more or less enjoyable. If there are a lot of clues ending with question marks (indicating misdirection) or referring to subjects with which you are less familiar, you’ll find that you get a different kind of enjoyment than if the clues are all “straight” and familiar.
4. Finally, there’s the difficulty of the puzzle. If it’s too easy it isn’t much of a challenge, and it’s probably not going to be very enjoyable. And if it’s too difficult, you get frustrated and feel you need to “cheat” by looking up some words in a dictionary or online reference. That’s not very satisfying. So the difficulty has to be “just right” — the Goldilocks phenomenon.

The reason the really good puzzles are, well, really good is that the editors are keenly aware of these four dimensions and tweak them carefully to suit their audiences. A good editor is perhaps as important to a crossword’s final character as the constructor — and he or she is what separates the really good puzzles from the mediocre or poor ones.