The Stickler Weekly 46 Solution

I’ve been solving cryptic crosswords since I was 15 – that’s almost 40 years. I compiled my first published crossword in my 20s in a staff magazine and considered myself a professional setter in my early 30s. Those early compiling days were interesting, not just because of the lack of technology, but because my setting skill relied almost totally on what I’d gleaned from solving. This had a profound impact on the crosswords I designed and the clues I wrote. It’s amazing how little I had really picked up as a solver, something I see repeated regularly when experienced solvers have a go at setting. Even UK Times solvers-turned-setters who have been fed the most rigid clues for decades can start using questionable devices they have never seen used before. How can/does this happen? A solver will break down clues, apply indicators, substitute abbreviations, extract letter fragments, all without really understanding what’s happening – they don’t need to understand to solve, they just need be able to piece together a wordplay and find an answer. Thus, as a setter, an anagram indicator becomes just a mechanism to change letters and its tense or position grammatically gets totally overlooked; or an indirect anagram is used even though as a solver they had never seen one used in a major publication. The use of obscure abbreviations is a common trap, where the novice setter has taken the use of some abbreviations in their favourite crossword as an endorsement of all abbreviations, no matter the source or usage. The lesson? If you want to have a go at setting, don’t totally rely on your solving experience to guide you – read books by professional setters, expand you solving horizon, read crossword blogs where solvers write about their concerns with clues, and get at least one person with lots of solving experience to test your work. This last piece of advice only works if you are prepared to act on any constructive feedback given, which is possibly the biggest stumbling block in becoming a respected setter.