The Stickler Weekly 37 Solution

What do you think is the most important factor a setter has to consider before they sit down to construct a cryptic crossword for a new publication/outlet? Grid size? Difficulty? Frequency? References used? Answer choices? They are all part of the cryptic equation, but what is the main driver of all of these? It’s the solving demographic, that is, who, on average reads the publication the crossword appears in and who do you want it to appeal to? It’s wrong, for example, to create a really hard crossword in a daily paper if the answers appear the next day, unless, of course, you acknowledge you are trying to appeal to a very small section of the readership. It’s commonsense to have the difficulty of the crossword match the frequency of the crossword so that solvers can roll on from one day to the other. Likewise, if you know the majority of your solvers are from more mature age-groups, using modern slang or words that only live in the virtual domain and not published references will alienate solvers. It’s also important to remember solvers may be at different solving levels, so there’s a challenge to cater for everyone – newbies to veterans – in every crossword, that is, of course, if you want to write an all-inclusive crossword.
The Stickler Weekly presents its own problems in this area as there’s a temptation on my side to provide a week-long challenge, but I know to give EVERYONE this experience, the crossword would have to be ridiculously difficult, so the crossword must present a decent challenge, but one that should be solved over the week with persistent effort.