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methods of crossword construction

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wbg:
I have no idea how anyone could come up with three stacked 15-letter answers by hand.  I admire those who can do it, but I know I could not, except by some extraordinary piece of luck.  Brains are organized in different ways.  My late father-in-law had a list brain.  His wife would mention things they needed from the store over the course of the week.  He never wrote anything down.  On Saturday, he'd go to the store and buy everything.  He could rattle off the birthdays of everyone in the family.  Then there are chess brains, looking many moves ahead.  Card brains, people who can tell you who played what card for the whole game.  The doc on a ship I served on was a serious gin player.  He invariably knew what cards I was holding well before the end of the game.  NO ONE could beat him.  It seems to me that manually constructing crosswords is somewhat the same.  The skill can be honed, but you've either got the knack or you don't.

I've spent maybe 40 hours total messing with Crossword Compiler.  I like it.  Seems to me that the only sensible approach for those without the gift, like me, is to start with some theme answers, crosses you like, words you like, whatever, making liberal use of Autofill and cancel.  I think Nancy Salomon made the point that, if Autofill can't fill the grid, neither can you.  If some of what Autofill comes up with seems good, accept the fill, delete what you don't like, and keep going.  You do have to keep thinking about neat words that can be popped in as you go along, including words that are unlikely to be in any word list.

Those are just some meandering thoughts from a neophyte.

jorkel:
If you've given it the old college try -- constructing by hand -- and it just isn't working out, then it's time to buy software like Crossword Compiler.  Be advised that the word lists that come with software are not spectacular, so you may want to get onto the Cruciverb mail list and ask for someone to mentor you in crossword construction.  In the process of doing so, you'll probably gain access to a much better word list.

Thomps2525:
wbg and jorkel recommend Crossword Compiler. Yeah, but then I'd be admitting that I'm not smart enough to compose a crossword all by my lil' self. Today's New York Times crossword has four 15-letter answers at the top and four more at the bottom. That means that there are 30 four-letter combinations which either begin or end an up-and-down word and I can never figure out how the puzzle creator can do that. I remember seeing a puzzle that had eleven 15-letter answers: four at the top, four at the bottom and three in the middle. I've noticed that the majority of the long answers contain many of the most common letters, such as E, S, R, T, D, A and I, and a lot of them are phrases where every other letter is a vowel.  Does anyone know if the puzzle maker starts with only one 15-letter word at the top and then fills in a few four-letter words at, say, 2-down and 5-down and 8-down and 12-down and then tries to come up with the second 15-letter across word? That might be easier than coming up with four 15-letter words to start with. Puzzles appear easy to construct but they really aren't. "Kids, don't try this at home!"

wbg:
Another factor in the mix is a person's attitude toward computers, maybe.  I like them; bought an original IBM PC in late 1982.  The full-power version.  64K of RAM, not just one floppy drive but two, each with a capacity of 160K!  With a small monochrome (green) monitor and a dot matrix printer, the setup cost around $4000.  Had at least one ever since.  So I enjoy using the software.

If you enjoy constructing by hand, great!  Do it!  If you like doing it using software, do that.  It doesn't seem like a question of moral superiority to me.  At the end, when you decide the grid is done, it is what it is and it doesn't matter how it was created.  (I remember seeing a book of sudoku puzzles that proudly proclaimed on the cover that the puzzles were hand-crafted by Japanese masters.  Sheesh!  A bunch of numbers!)  Then, of course, it has to be clued, and there, it seems to me, software is much less useful.

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