Earlier this week, Twitter helped the following question from the icon designer Louie Mantia go viral: “What’s something that seems obvious within your profession, but the general public seems to misunderstand?” Fellow crossword constructor Laura Braunstein had this to say in reply:
In a word we use on the Internet these days ... THIS. Whenever I meet people at a party and the subject of my job comes up, someone will usually ask me, “How do you go about writing a crossword? Do you write the answers first or the clues first?” I never thought there was much mystery to it ... or maybe I did before I’d ever attempted to write a puzzle, but that was long enough ago that I really don’t remember what I thought about puzzles in my Life Before Crosswords. I suppose it’s a little like asking an author how one writes a fictional story; does she start with the characters, the general plot line, the time period, or something else? The point is, maybe the process of how one builds a crossword isn’t so intuitive if you only solve puzzles rather than write them. And to reiterate: You start with the grid, or the theme and the grid if it has a theme. The clues always come later.
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