I did not know she has been repeatedly criticized, throughout her lifetime and after, for her deeply racist portrayals of Black children. She is a writer I only knew by name I knew she wrote children’s books and mysteries. I initially didn’t think much of seeing ENID Blyton appear frequently in the puzzle. The more crosswords I solved, the more interested I became in their complicated syntax. This type of wordplay was what had first enticed me about language when I started reading as a kid, and it was what I missed as an adult. When I stumbled on one of these clues I was annoyed before I laughed. Like the best writing, crosswords embraced misdirection and the unexpected. A great crossword clue was simultaneously coherent and bewildering. I had forgotten how malleable English could be, that there was not one inherently correct way to write and express something, that there could be style even in the shortest phrases. I immediately loved the playfulness of the crossword, how it seemed divorced from the strictness and formality of language that I had started to fear working in publishing. It’s so satisfying, it seems impossible that it could have ever been created by something and not just dropped, flawless from its inception, into the world. Looking at a truly perfect block of a crossword, where the clues are snappy and the fill is unforced, is like looking at a honeycomb or a four-leaf clover. It’s not just about the beauty of a word in meaning or in appearance it’s about its length, where in the word the vowels sit, how the word can interlock with another. To me, a crossword puzzle is one of the most elegant forms of writing, as mathematical as it is artistic. I had to understand how it was possible that someone could ever make something so brilliant, and so I started trying to make my own. My fascination had morphed into a curious admiration: I didn’t just want to solve them I wanted to untangle how they were created. So instead of writing what I wanted to write, I turned to crosswords. I was dreaming in tiny black and white boxes. What I wanted to write was criticism about film and fiction, but I didn’t know who would want to read it. What we’re often asked for instead is stories about our pain or our trauma, and I had no interest in narrating the tragedy of my mixed Blackness. I did not have the confidence to get torn apart in Track Changes and wanted no part of it.Īnd most importantly, I had internalized the message a lot of women and women of color receive when they express interest in writing: Our words are not universal. I’d watched my coworkers bicker in endless email chains, sniping at each other over comma placement and em dashes on the company’s blog. I had just left my first job in the book industry and had seen the depths of bad prose in the slush pile. I had kept a journal on and off, had experimented with writing a summer newsletter to friends, but still, writing terrified me. In 2019, I had very little interest in writing publically, despite being extremely jealous of anyone who described themselves as a writer.
Most of them I wouldn’t ever use, but I imagined SLEEPERCELL and BEDROOMPOP, tied together by SHUTEYE as the reveal for a slumber-related puzzle. I started an Excel sheet to store possible answers, sorted by length. If I was reading and stumbled on a peculiar word or piece of trivia, I’d wonder how it could be incorporated into a puzzle. I’d try to think through gaps I’d left in the puzzle at my desk. My rat brain was listless and in search of a quantifiable reward. Rarely are we given a problem with a solution that can be literally spelled out. The puzzle had a beginning and an end, and you either got it or you didn’t. Even though I was unable to complete them without a couple of hints, I immediately understood the appeal of a crossword. As I started reading clues, I realized I had never heard of common clues like ALEE (the side of the ship sheltered from the wind) or the Eugene O’Neill play ANNA Christie (embarrassing, since at the time I was working at a theater). At first, I even struggled with the Monday puzzles-the easiest in the week. It took me a while to finally solve a puzzle. During a mundane workday, the satisfaction of puzzle solving was irresistible. I’d strip the puzzle section from the office newspaper in the morning and keep it at my desk all day, peeking at it during long phone meetings. I wasn’t good enough to solve in pen-I’m still barely good enough to solve in pencil-but in the summer of 2019, I started doing the New York Times daily crossword puzzle.
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