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Cruciverbalift Patrick Berry Wants You to Win in the End
P atrick Berry has the ultimate cock
tail-party job. Whenever he finds
himself with a group of strangers,
holding a glass of melting ice cubes
in sweaty palms, someone will ask him what
he does for a living, and Berry almost always
has the most interesting career in the room.
He writes crossword puzzles for the New
York Times.
Patrick Berry is a cruciverbalist, the formal
title for a puzzle writer, and, yes, he pays
his mortgage by doing so. His office attire is
often a T-shirt and faded khakis. But Berry is
quick to add that he doesn't just spend his
day firing off creative blasts of wordplay.
In fact, if he were to start explaining the
ins and outs of his job, the conversation
would quickly devolve into esoterica:
databases, 180-degree symmetry, black
and white square counts. Not so excit
ing, Berry thinks.
But Berry's day at the office results
in a test of America's intelligence and
ingenuity; crosswords are a simple cul
tural brainpower assessment much like
a Rubik's Cube. Can you finish a Sunday
New York Times puzzle? Do you use a
pencil or a pen? -
Just over a year ago, Berry followed
his college professor brother here to
Athens from Chapel Hill, NC, and he's
been living an unassuming, work-from-
home life ever since. His house is shaped
like the first letter of the alphabet,
spartanly decorated with a wordsmith's
necessities: a coffeepot and bookshelves.
Berry graduated from Orlando's Rollins
College with a degree in computer sci
ence in the early '90s, but it's words,
not ones and zeros, that enthrall him.
He has a devotional love affair with the
English language and quotes Mark Twain
when describing the awesome power
of words: "The difference between the
almos^ right word and the right word is really
a large matter—it's the difference between
the lightning bug and the lightning."
After college, Berry took a job in the desk
top publishing business. He settled in Chapel
Hill and continued constructing puzzles as
he became increasingly dissatisfied with the .
corporate world. He honed his skills selling
puzzles to Games magazine throughout the
'90s. Following an employment shake-up in
1998, 3erry leapt into full-time puzzle con
struction, a decision that meant devoting a
year to building a word and phrase database—
an essential tool for any word puzzle maker.
A Puzzle’s Progress
What does a database have to do with
crosswords? Themes and clues are the stars of
the puzzle, but it's the database that performs
the grunt work. Every year, Berry spends time
grooming his database, chopping through
lists, phrases and clever definitions in order
to keep his puzzles fresh and relevant. Beny's
database contains a couple hundred thousand
entries, which he recently began ranking
according to quality. Words that contain rarely
used letters such as Q or X, or those that
have particularly good clueing potential, will
receive a high rating; words like eel—short
words that contain common letters and are
difficult to clue creatively—receive a low
rating. His quality indication system isn't
finished yet, and won't be any time soon.
Fully rating his entire database would be like
entering a "black hole of time" similar to
1998—the initial year of word-logging and a
period he's not willing to revisit.
If evaluating your ammunition is the cru
cial first step to becoming a cruciverbalist,
the actual fkst step to puzzle writing is an
entirely different test: developing the theme.
Themes require time to brainstorm and
must come first because they're the puzzle's
hooks. Theme writing is the innate, creative
act that forms a great puzzle; a strong one
is the difference between a software-leaning
amateur and a hardcore cruciverbalist who
likes to black out squares with a soft lead
pencil. Even if you have a bunch of clever def
initions and a well-filled grid, Berry believes
a well-built theme makes a stronger product.
"Crosswords are a bunch of mini-epiphanies,"
he says, and solving the theme is the big one.
For example, Berry once constructed a vari
ety puzzle titled "Noah's Ark." Solvers had to
answer the themed clues and then add or take
out twp extra letters to fill the entry. The clue
would lead the solver to the word sturdy, and
he or she would then add two "A"s to make
Saturday.
Themes not only set a puzzle's tone but
also determine its shape; a puzzle's longer
entries are usually the same size lengthwise
and are placed symmetrically in a puzzle. From
there a constructor fills in the rest, or as Berry
calls it, "backs into the grid." There is a seri
ous structure to this. All crosswords must have
180-degree rotational symmetry, which means
that if you turn a blank crossword upside
down, the pattern of black squares appears
the same. Themed entries must conform to
the symmetry as well: if there's an eight-letter
entry on the second line in the top right cor
ner, there must be an eight-letter entry on the
second-to-last line in the bottom left.
During the clueing process, when he's
racking his database for words to fill the
remaining white space, Berry runs into a frus
trating part of puzzle construction: avoiding
crosswordese, those infrequently used words,
such as Ara (a constellation), that haunt the
outer edges of puzzle grids. After packing
in longer words with catchy definitions he'll
eventually get squeezed into a corner, in need
of a three-letter word that starts with E and
ends with L. At this point a database query
is disappointing. "I hate to think about how
many times I've clued eel," he says.
Yet to his fens. Berry is a god at con
structing clean, seamless puzzles. Crossword
blogger, author and consistent.top-10
tournament finisher Amy Reynaldo says
that while other constructors fall back
on boring clunkers (amuser) or unorigi
nal space fillers (oleo), Beny shines
by constructing smooth, obscurity-free
puzzles.
"In a Berry puzzle, odds are that
all the words will be more familiar,"
Reynaldo says in an email. "So if you're
stuck on a tough clue, don't assume the
answer is something you've never heard
of. A regular word will eventually emerge
from the haze."
Berry says it's important to use words
that everyone knows; it's their clues he
prefers to make a little tricky or oblique.
But "not every clue can be a gem." Some
have to be serviceable. And the ability
to recognize which entries deserve the
most creativity is what makes Berry a
puzzle god. If he clues eel occasionally,
it's in service to Something much more
whimsical and elegant, say elevator
music. "Songs that might make you get
out on a floor," Berry writes. The differ
ence is simple yet memorable.
By making the clues difficult and not
the words themselves, Berry keeps the
puzzle fun instead of frustrating. "You
want to bedevil people as much as possible,
but you want them to win in the end," he
says. "If someone spends an hour on a clue,
you want him or her to be satisfied."
Berry's puzzles, however, are anything but
breezy, uncomplicated time-killers. The 2009
American Crossword Puzzle Tournament used
a Berry creation in the final round. He's also
considered a late-week specialist at the New
York Times, which reserves its most challeng
ing puzzles for Fridays and Saturdays.
Berry's latest book, Puzzle Masterpieces:
Elegant Challenges for Crossword Lovers, is
a collection of variety word puzzles that
take fanciful forms; they may wind across
a page, use triangles instead of squares, or
take serpentine shapes. He feels his craft
shines in these puzzles; after all, his interest
in wordplay began with, variety puzzles, not
crosswords. "Knowing the answer isn't always
enough," Berry says. Once you've solved the
clue, there's the added difficulty of figur
ing out how the answer fits into the puzzle's
shape. Variety puzzles also require some
instruction for the solver, but they're free of
what Berry considers a crossword's weakness:
crosswordese and short words like eel. Variety
puzzles aren't constrained by grid dimensions
either; he can fill them entirely with five-let
ter words if he feels like it. While he considers
them more interesting to solve, variety puzzles
just aren't as salable as crosswords, which is
why he constructs traditional grids to help
make puzzle writing a viable career.
The Bottom Line
v
In over 10 years as a self-employed puzzle
constructor, Berry has published around 120
New York Times puzzles, two compilations of
his work and a Crossword Puzzles for Dummies
book that's considered the manual for becom
ing a constructor. He also edits the crossword
for the Chronicle of Higher Education and con
structs a regular puzzle for Yahoo.
In terms of book and daily puzzle writing,
Berry's output places him in a small demo
graphic: according to him, he's one of roughly
10 full-time puzzle constructors in the coun
try. So, while there might be two accountants,
a few schoolteachers and a bunch of waiters
at your next Oscar party, Berry is probably the
only guy who writes Sit and Solve crossword
puzzle books for commuters.
Even though there's very little professional,
full-time competition, Berry still hustles due
to a shrinking number of venues for his work
and a growing number of amateurs vying for
the attention of the few major players: the
L.A. Times, the New York Times and the Wall
Street Journal.
Daily papers and other one-offs only pay
when the puzzles appear in print, and because
these spec gigs can sit on puzzles for an
extended period, Berry relies on-regular gigs
like Yahoo and the Chronicle to meet the bot
tom line.
The top-tier venue, the New York Times,
pays $1,000 for a weekend puzzle and $200
for a daily; the Wall Street Journal pays $350
for a weekend; and the L.A. Times recently
raised its daily contributor pay to $85 a
puzzle.
Opening Up
Puzzlers are a tight-knit community, histor
ically gathering at annual conferences such as
the National Puzzlers' League, and the person
alities are known by their first names. But just
as newspapers' websites opened up reporters
to the megabyte-quick reactions of their audi
ences through anonymous comments, a con
structor's work is now debated daily in online
forums and blogs. Luckily, Berry appreciates
that sort of give-and-take.
A solver once objected to Berry's use of
bedsore in a pirzzle, an entry that he clued as
"Possible result of pathological lying?" The
solver said that if Berry had truly experienced
a bedsore he would not have used the word.
Some constructors and editors discourage the
use of words that suggest disease or death,
and because he hadn't suffered from bedsores
and couldn't speak to the experience of the
wound, Berry paid attention to the criticism,
eventually deciding not to use bedsore again.
Though he likes to err on the side of caution,
Berry says that "some people are offended way
too easily, so I'm not always going to back
off."
That's a good thing, because what's taboo
in cruciverbalist circles is small-talk gold in
others.
Andre Gallant
AUGUST 5,2009-FLAGPOLE.COM 9