Learning By Doing

My first attempts at setting involved pencils and graph paper.

My father, a born engineer, has spent his entire life taking things apart in order to figure out how they work. At fourteen, he attached wheels to a push lawnmower and made his own go-cart. At nineteen, he deconstructed and rebuilt an air compressor. When I was four, he built an entire car (The Lolley Trolley) from scratch.

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To my father, the world is a collection of systems whose mysteries are one careful disassembly away from being revealed.

I assumed that this instinct had just passed me by. Unlike my sister, the architect, or my brother who designs video games, I've never cared about the inner workings of things.

Then I started solving cryptic crosswords. Out of nowhere, that engineering curiosity kicked in. No sooner had I gotten the hang of solving the puzzles than I wanted to figure out how to make one myself.

The Lolley Trolley, circa 1981.

I wanted to figure out what makes a good puzzle tick.

But despite searching high and low for the rules that govern the setting of cryptics, I came up empty-handed. I could find no books or blogs on the subject; just a small community of cryptic crossword aficionados on twitter who occasionally share clues. Too impatient to wait for the right lesson to come along, I sat down with a few Fraser Simpson puzzles, a coffee, and my newfound engineer's curiosity, and set to work figuring out for myself how his grids and clues are structured.

The first cryptic crossword I ever made. Note the overabundance of black space and the lack of symmetry. After designing it with pencil and paper, I drew it up using Microsoft Word.

I have made twenty puzzles since then. Interestingly, the more I strive to learn, the more I connect with people who can help. For example, a veteran setter I found on twitter turned me on to puzzle-making software. (Making my first few puzzles with graph paper, a pencil, and a heavy-duty eraser was incredibly arduous.) My question about minimum answer length was also recently answered: although Fraser Simpson's shortest is four letters, this cannot be a universal rule because I recently saw a clue from The Times with a three-letter answer.

It can be frustrating, learning all this in dribs and drabs. As with writing, I often wish I could just read a comprehensive "how-to" manual and not waste my time with all the fumbling in the dark. But this is what learning by doing is all about. You pop the hood, check out what's inside, figure out the unique and essential role that each part plays, then apply that knowledge to your own project. It might take a while but eventually, when you turn the key, you are rewarded with the low purr of victory.