Putting it Together… how Poat set Bit by Bit
With Sondheim being a noted fan of themed cryptic crosswords (while I’m a big Sondheim fan in return), I was aiming to prepare something as a form of tribute in time for his 80th birthday in March 2010. I saw a production of Sunday in the Park with George in 2009, and explored that for possible themes – and a little in haste, compiled a puzzle that year based on a form of George Cross intertwining the names Sondheim and Seurat, with some pointillism-style markings to fill other cells. But it wasn’t satisfactory – the dots in the grid didn’t have any particular purpose or present a recognisable image, nor indeed were they coloured in any way, and there was no real endgame. A test solver told me as much, so I put it to one side in the hope of making radical amendments in time for Sondheim’s 90th in 2020 (some hope!)
Over time I mused about various other ideas including the song Finishing The Hat (a great theme on the face of it, which I believe has now been exploited by Phi elsewhere). But nothing came to fruition, and the puzzle was firmly on the back-burner along with multiple other half-baked ideas until by chance I discovered the dot code, a 2D barcoding method for product identification which uses a crossword-adjacent 21×14 grid as standard. Bingo – with Dot being a pivotal character and wordplay element in the musical, that was the concept that could tie things together, and spelling out the encoded SONDHEIM in a very large grid was surely a suitable dénouement. If I added back one block per row (ready for later deletion), that would make a grid with tolerable cross-checking, but even then the entry lengths were too short and bitty. Hence the idea of stringing various entries together, which permitted Ximenean checking virtually throughout.
I generally use Sympathy to assist with grid construction, but concatenating entries proved beyond its capabilities – so I exploited the ‘free lights’ function of QXW. Even then there was no reasonable fill, unless entries were able to start at any point within the string. Making the whole output as thematic as possible, I decided to fix the contents of unclued two-letter entries so that they would comprise the letters of the protagonists (again using a free light across those 14 cells, but with jumbling permitted). There seemed to be only one fill with the parameters I had chosen plus the inclusion of POINTILLISM as an answer. The grid came together around July 2021 when the great man was still with us – and the puzzle title is a nod to digital encoding while also quoting from the song Putting it Together:
It has to come to life!
Bit by bit, putting it together
Piece by piece, only way to make a work of art
Every moment makes a contribution
Every little detail plays a part
Having just a vision’s no solution
Everything depends on execution
Putting it together, that’s what counts!
Virtually all my puzzles have predominantly ‘normal’ clues unless there are good reasons otherwise, and the number of answers gave me an opportunity to signal a message in an unusual way. The entry method and clueing device are not strictly related to the theme, but I hope it made a refreshing change. I finally got round to composing the clues by April 2023, fourteen years after starting, and the Magpie seemed like the only possible place it might appear. Thanks to the team for making it happen.
May 26th, 2024 at 6:21 pm
It was a stunning puzzle, thank you. I’m sorry I never seem to get round to submitting solutions. For long you’ve been my nemesis, but now all is forgiven.