Sarah Lolley
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Cryptic on the Orient Express

8/5/2014

2 Comments

 
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When I write, I am alone. I'm physically alone in a quiet room but I'm also alone in my thoughts. Sometimes I become so absorbed in the text that I literally do not hear anything, including the sound of my husband's voice if he walks in and asks me a question. It's a solitary exercise, writing, from the first sentence I type out on the screen to the moment I hit "send" on the email to my editor.

So I'm always a little amazed when an acquaintance calls up to say she stumbled across a piece of mine in a magazine and enjoyed it. It seems magical somehow that a piece I wrote in such solitude has made its way out into the busy, bustling world and has a life of its own, interacting with people that I have never met and probably never will.

Setting cryptics is the same but even better, I'm discovering. When I write a mystery story, I'm providing all the content. All the reader has to do is absorb it. But a cryptic crossword requires the person solving it to get involved. Cryptic solvers become part of the narrative of the puzzle, doing the work that the detective in a crime story would.
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I owe this realization to a woman named Julie whom I have never met. She lives in Melbourne and avidly decodes crochet patterns and cryptic crosswords, blogging about how she made her way to the answer. A few weeks ago, she tackled one of my practice puzzles. Once she had the whole thing figured out, she asked if she could blog about the process and I said "sure".

The exhilaration I felt as I read her blog post amazed me. "Yes!" I kept thinking as Julie described the process of figuring out certain clues. "That's exactly what I was going for!" It felt as though Julie had crawled into my mind and was tracing each line of thought back to the source. I had left a trail of breadcrumbs and Julie found every one.


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At home, I have a framed copy of the November 8, 2004 issue of the New Yorker. The illustration, by Adrian Tomine, shows two people on subway cars moving in different directions reading the same book. I framed it because one day, I hope to come across someone on the metro (or subway, or tube) reading a book that I have written.

This feels like the equivalent for cryptics.
Thank you, Julie.

- Sarah

2 Comments
anax
8/5/2014 05:11:53 am

Part of my clue-writing forum is a thread which allows submissions of full cryptic crosswords, and some of the extensive ‘solving experience’ write-ups are exceptional. It’s the only online place I’m aware of where solvers regularly respond to newcomer puzzles in such depth.
Once you go pro as a setter it becomes more difficult to dip into this level of feedback, especially if you’re doing it full-time. We rarely have deadlines as such, but you’re constantly aware of how many puzzles you need to produce, and as a result you try to (have to) cut down on the amount of time you spend reading blogs.
As far as I can remember I’ve never had anyone post details of the order in which clues were solved or how they were broken down, but I have learned how the clues I was happiest with, or regarded as far from spectacular, often don’t get the responses I imagine. This is possibly not verbatim, but an ancient Times clue for VIOLA went something like:

Every second of every minute someone plants a flower (5)

To me it was one of those extremely rare ‘ideal’ clues where everything fitted perfectly, but when the puzzle was blogged it barely got mentioned; yet there was another clue in the same puzzle which a few solvers raved about but which I thought was run-of-the-mill. My own experience is that we get intimately involved with a puzzle while we’re working on it – it somehow develops its own character; and we like to think that character will worm its way into the minds of solvers. It can do that, to an extent, but never as much as we think. And why should it? By the time the next crossword is under way the character of its predecessor is pretty much forgotten, so we can’t expect the solver to have any less fickle a relationship with it.

Reply
Sarah
8/6/2014 11:49:58 am

Oh, that is an exquisite clue. Thanks for sharing it, and your experiences. Even with my limited experience, I've been surprised by how little attention some of my favourite clues have gotten. The one of which I'm most proud hardly garnered any attention at all:

Tells all about those involved in a murder (5)

The answer to that one is CROWS. On the flip side, I had a great deal of appreciation for a clue that I thought was fairly simplistic:

Date unfastened corset (6)

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    About Sarah

    I'm a writer, adventurer, amateur setter of cryptic crosswords, lover of "ah-ha!" moments, and exhausted mom.

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