Australian Crosswords

In the early days I had no luck plugging my cryptic crosswords, so I turned to writing themed crosswords to try and sell to magazines, believing I was on a sure winner. Trouble is, writing theme crosswords is hard and time-consuming, and editors are generally under the impresssion that a theme crossword should contain 100% theme words. As a relative novice, I thought this sounded reasonable and consequently failed every time. A while back I mentioned the first dedicated crossword PC program I used called Crossword Designer (CD). At the time I considered it a powerful tool as, for the first time, I could fill a grid with words of my choice. I was a young setter and knew this tool gave me a huge advantage and I set about trying to exploit it. CD offered new hope with theme crosswords, with the facility to use my own wordlists and pick my own words. I targetted the gardening magazine sector as there were a few on the market and there are so many plants and garden-related things. Many, many hours followed compiling a wordlist from the indexes of every gardening/plant book I could find, and searching dictionaries and thesauruses. I even went through the entire Encyclopedia Botanica. Every suitable noun got a plural entry and every verb ended up with multiple related entries. At various times during my wordlist build I tried auto-filling some grids just to see if I had enough words to work with. I think about 1000 words gives some hope of a complete fill, 2000 gives multiple options and 5000 gives great choice. I’ve still got that wordlist with 5600 entries, but it has an inherent problem – about 70% of the words aren’t usable as plant names don’t generally have synonyms and plant descriptions aren’t clue-sized and unlikely to identify a specific plant anyway. I didn’t think of that until I filled 15 grids with garden words and found most of the entries were for obscure plants that I couldn’t clue! You live and learn.

There are a number of rules of thumb regarding the structure of a cryptic clue that new solvers are taught to give them a good starting point. One is that most clues have two parts: definition and wordplay, with the definition at the beginning or end, and what’s left over is the wordplay. Another is that the definition is effectively the same as that used in a straight crossword, and therefore effort needs to be put in to identify it. Another common one, related to how a clue is read, is that punctuation in general can be ignored. Such a “rule” is a dangerous one as punctuation may indeed have a purpose and not all punctuation is equal in this context. For instance, it’s one thing to ignore a comma that may break up the reading of a clue, but another thing entirely to ignore a possessive apostrophe or a hyphen that defines a term as an adjective. Remember, this rule is an “in general” one and is meant to help solvers process clues, removing an artificial barrier introduced by punctuation that determines how clues are read, but doesn’t actually interfere with the content of the clues.