All I can do is just write the best clues I can, and that’s what I try to do. I let them handle that because that’s what they’re really expert in. When the New York Times accepts a puzzle and they edit it, they calibrate the difficulty level and make sure everything’s balanced. So, for example, one of my clues was, “Not a big Mac?” And the answer was “laptop.” That was a clue I wrote that stayed. I try to come up with clever wordplay clues. I had a Diary of a Wimpy Kid reference in my original manuscript, and it got nixed.Ī lot of people focus on pop-culture references in crossword-puzzle clues. All the 21st-century references I’ve put in have gotten edited out thus far in two puzzles. It varies depending on the constraints of the puzzle.ĭo you try to include references that one might find in a puzzle constructed by someone much older than you? Meaning coming up with a theme, filling in the grid, writing the clues. But I’ve done Sunday crosswords in a weekend from start to finish. This puzzle took me about two or three weeks because I was working on it with the editing team. How long does it take you to construct something like a Sunday puzzle? I was very lucky - there’s actually an English teacher here who writes crossword puzzles for the New York Times as well. And then, in October, they wrote back, and we worked on this Sunday puzzle together. Eventually, last year, they accepted the Monday puzzle, which ran in August. They get 200 submissions a week for seven spots. I got rejected probably 15, 16-plus times - it’s about a 3 percent acceptance rate to get published there. And I started from there.Īnd it took a while. And then I just found my crossword software that I had downloaded two years prior and realized that I really enjoyed it. But, anyway, camp got canceled during COVID, and I was like, What am I going to do during the summer? I don’t have much going on. It was rejected in a perfunctory fashion. I sent one puzzle to the New York Times just to say that I did. And then I was joking, “What if I sent one to the New York Times?” So I got the software. This is five, six years ago at this point. I’m not kidding - there were like 20 kids around me. You’re telling me the jocks like crosswords now? There’s sports clues, pop-culture clues, etc. Because a crossword puzzle just involves a lot of depth of knowledge. And I noticed that that was a way for me and my more athletically inclined friends to interact and find a common thing that we both enjoyed. But I started solving puzzles at camp because I was a nerdier kid, and I go to a sportsy camp. It would just say “by Garrett Chalfin” in small font in the corner. But those don’t have bios on them, so you wouldn’t have really known who I was. So how did it come to pass that you got your crossword into the Sunday Times last week?
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