So, I decided to try and make a crossword puzzle today. I thought, “Hey, I play these all the time, how hard can it be to make one?” Turns out, pretty darn hard.
Brainstorming and Gridlock
First, I grabbed a piece of paper and drew a grid. I figured a 15×15 grid would be standard. Then I stared at it. And stared some more. Blank. Totally blank.
I decided to start with a theme. “Animals,” I thought. Easy enough, right? I scribbled down a few long animal names: “hippopotamus,” “chameleon,” “armadillo.”
- hippopotamus
- chameleon
- armadillo
The Interlocking Nightmare
This is where things went south. I tried fitting “hippopotamus” across the top. Okay, cool. Then I tried to make words intersect with it. “Chameleon” didn’t fit anywhere nicely. Neither did “armadillo.” I erased, redrew, erased some more.
I realized I needed shorter words to connect everything. So, I added “dog,” “cat,” “eel,” and things like that. But then I got stuck with weird letter combinations. Like, what word ends in “qx”? Nothing! More erasing.
Clue Conundrums
Then came the clues. Oh, the clues! Even for the words I did manage to fit in, coming up with clever clues was a whole other beast. “A furry friend” for “dog”? Too basic. “Striped equine”? Zebra. Too Easy. I spent ages just trying to make the clues challenging but not impossible.
Giving Up (For Now)
After a couple of hours, my paper looked like a toddler had attacked it with a pencil. There were smudges everywhere, crossed-out words, and a grid that was barely recognizable. I had about five words filled in, and they probably didn’t even make sense together.
I crumpled up the paper and tossed it in the trash. My respect for crossword constructors just went up about a thousand percent. It’s way harder than it looks! Maybe I’ll try again another day, but for now, I’m sticking to solving crosswords, not creating them.
