A man who wrote crossword puzzles for The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal explains what his job entails by Jacquelyn Smith on Apr 20, 2016, 3:07 PM Advertisement
 Clue: Three time champion of the American Crossword Tournament; former puzzle writer for The New York Times, The New Yorker, and the Wall Street Journal. Answer: Trip Payne. Payne, who is currently a staff writer for PuzzleSocial's Daily Celebrity Crossword, has been a full-time puzzlemaker since 1990. "When I was young, I was very interested in puzzles and games," says Payne, who was featured in the 2006 award-winning documentary "Wordplay." "I thought it would be interesting to try to make up my own puzzles, and when I was 14 years old I had a crossword published in Games Magazine. Over time, that hobby became my career," he tells Business Insider. We recently spoke to Payne about what his job entails. Here's what he had to say: SEE ALSO: Here's what it's really like to be a hacker at one of the world's biggest tech companies  'Here's how the puzzlemaking process works ... ' "Puzzles typically begin with the 'theme' — the thing that the longest answers in the puzzle have in common. "The first thing that a puzzlemaker has to do is come up with theme answers that will fit properly in the grid, since all crossword grids have symmetrical patterns. "After the puzzlemaker places the theme entries into a grid, they then decide where the rest of the black squares should go. This is not always easy — you want to make sure that you don't have too many places that will be tricky to fill in later, or where you'd have to resort to hard words to fill it in."
'The next step is filling in the rest of the grid.' "The goal is to have every word in the grid be something that the solver will recognize. Sometimes, as with the Daily Celebrity Crossword, you want everything to be solvable even by someone who has never solved a crossword before; other times you can have the vocabulary be a little more difficult, but you never want it to be truly obscure. "Difficulty level should come from the cluing, not the words in the puzzle. After the grid is done, then it's time to clue. In an easy puzzle, the goal is to make clues without multiple possible answers (a 5-letter word for 'Fast' might be 'RAPID or 'QUICK' or 'HASTY' or several other things). In a harder puzzle, you want those ambiguities, and you also want to throw in some wordplay to keep solvers a little bit off-balance. "How long a puzzle takes to create depends on a lot of things — the size, difficulty level, whether there are any particular constraints, and so on. I've had puzzles take me mere hours to create; I've had others take weeks. I can usually complete a simple puzzle in a matter of hours, whereas a medium or hard puzzle could take a day or two."
'Writer's block could sometimes be an issue.' "Most of the time, I have a theme to begin with, or at least an area. For example, Daily Celebrity Crossword has a different theme each day, such as TV Tuesday and Sports Fan Friday, and that gives me a starting place for brainstorming what the puzzle should be about. "I have a great deal of respect for the constructors who have assignments where they have to release puzzles every week with fresh, original themes. I have rarely been in that position, but when I was, it's true that writer's block could sometimes be an issue. I would typically try to work ahead of schedule so that when writer's block did hit, it wouldn't put me behind deadline."
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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