I majored in creative writing, and I’ve been editing for almost twenty years at this point, and I have to tell you: I’ve never labored over a sentence as much as I have while writing cryptic crosswords. And that is why I love them! The bigger your word count, the easier it is to hide a flaw. With a cryptic crossword, where every part of your sentence must serve at least two purposes (a surface sense and either a definitional or cryptic one—sometimes both simultaneously!), there’s absolutely no room to hide.
As I said, I majored in creative writing; I can bullshit a defense pretty well. I can justify the most tenuous of reasons why a bit of wordplay could work. I can point to a test solver’s ability to get the answer as proof that it does work. I can fall back on a good enough surface and say “perfect is the enemy of good.”
The challenge is to resist that urge. To shape the idea of the clue, to whittle away the fat, the imprecise language, the not-quite-ness of it all, and reach something dare I say unassailable? And I’m not there. But I’m finding the struggle to get there to be as much fun as solving a great slate of clues, and to that end, I hope to start posting a clue a day (from other setters I admire) beginning in July, and then to start streaming at least a puzzle or two a week at some point soon after now that the kids are sleeping a bit more through the night. Reading/solving is a big part of learning how to improve one’s own writing/setting, after all.
In the meantime, I hope you’re seeing growth in these puzzles and enjoying the ride. As usual, you can find the online solve and .puz file over at Crosshare (where I’m also currently running a cryptic crossword contest in their Discord channel, so come check it out!), and the PDF below. And much appreciation to skaldskaparmal and juff, who have not just been perennial test solvers, but solid supporters (and not just of journeyman setters like myself).
The Crossword Scholar 