Having enjoyed the recent flurry of setters’ blogs, perhaps it’s worth writing a few words about setting Sketchy, which was my first attempt at setting a thematic cryptic.

This puzzle’s somewhat drawn-out story begins back at the start of 2022. I’d set a few numericals in Listener, Magpie, and Crossnumbers Quarterly and wanted to dip a toe into setting a cryptic puzzle. I seem to remember that it really started by downloading QXW which instantly struck me as a super-impressive piece of software.

Wracking my brains for a theme to play around with so that I could take QXW for a proper test-drive, I had in mind that many of the puzzles I enjoyed seemed to link a couple of slightly disparate themes (preferably containing the same number of letters) and made use of any cryptically interpretable elements of anything thematic. I think I’d recently re-read The Ascent of Rum Doodle, which is a pretty hilarious parody of some of the early mountaineering literature. It’s partially ribbing Annapurna, which I’d also strongly recommend as a more factual but truly riveting epic tale from that era of adventure. Noticing that Annapurna and Rum Doodle had the same number of letters and that “ascent” could maybe indicate something going upwards in the grid, that was enough to get going.

Constructing the grid was then a fun task of learning the ropes with QXW, a not too onerous task given the excellent documentation. It didn’t actually take too long to arrive at the final grid, which of course wasn’t a groundbreaking construction in any way, but seemed nice enough for a first effort at least. I also read and frequently referred back to Don Manley’s brilliant Chambers Crossword Manual as well as the Magpie and Listener setters’ guidance documents to make sure I didn’t take too many liberties with unching and so on. Nevertheless, getting the barring right did involve a large degree of trial and error, with a strong resemblance to one of those whack-a-mole games. Fix an overchecked entry somewhere and suddenly about three underchecked ones rear their ugly heads!

With a completed grid, I thought I’d have a go at writing some clues. This was the scary bit! At this stage I wasn’t the most experienced solver having only really got into solving cryptics in 2020, so this was proper in-at-the-deep-end stuff, although having read Don’s book, I at least felt that while my clues might not be great, they’d at least be fairly Ximenean! Weighing up the pros and cons of my grid before I launched into clue-writing, the big con in my mind was the obscurity of the theme – would anywhere publish something based on such an obscure book as Rum Doodle? If anywhere would, it’d be Magpie, I thought. The more positive flip side of that was that obviously no-one else would dream of setting something on such an obscure theme; Dave Henning’s Crossword Database confirmed no-one had set anything to do with Rum Doodle, so I was safe in the knowledge that even if I took ages writing clues, no-one else was going to beat me to writing a Rum Doodle themed crossword.

I’ll come back to the clue-writing process in a moment, but I submitted the puzzle to Magpie in February 2022. Fast-forward to Magpie 237 (September 2022). Reading the preamble of Hedgehog’s puzzle, Teamwork, I instantly thought “ha, this is going to be Rum Doodle”. And of course it was. His superb puzzle was much more creative than mine, especially on the thematic clue mechanics front. It was appropriate that it should be Hedgehog as the setter too – he was the setter of the first ever Listener (a numerical) that I solved and every Hedgehog I’ve done since has been thoroughly enjoyable. I kind of assumed that this would consign my puzzle to the dustbin, and perhaps it should have done, but Jason offered me the chance to withdraw it or keep it in the queue until enough time had passed for Hedgehog’s puzzle to not be so fresh in the memory, and after a fair amount of thought, I decided to let it linger in the queue. My apologies to any solvers who think I should’ve gone for the other option! Whenever I’ve solved a couple of puzzles on similar themes (e.g. Wicker Man, Latin Squares), I’ve found it interesting to see how their approaches differ, so hopefully someone got that kind of appreciation out of my puzzle at least.

Anyhow, back to some thoughts on clue-writing as a complete newbie. Firstly, I found it increased my appreciation of finely crafted clues from experienced setters – it’s hard enough to write a set of passable clues, let alone the brilliant ones we often see in Magpie and the like. My thanks to the editors for their excellent improvements. Secondly, writing clues seems to be a great way to make solving others’ easier – when you’ve really had to concentrate on constructing clues, I think it’s sometimes easier to spot little things in clues while solving that I otherwise would’ve missed. Thirdly, it’s an interesting mix of creativity and precision. I’d recommend anyone who hasn’t tried setting something (perhaps that’s a very small subset of Magpie subscribers?) to give it a go. For the nuts and bolts of actually writing clues, I found clueclinic.com a good source of various reversal indicators etc., and reverse-searching Bradfords seems to be fruitful fairly often too. I tend to write clues in a spreadsheet, colour-coded in red/yellow/green for both difficulty and how good the clue is and aim to get rid of all the red quality ones after a couple of passes, hopefully leaving a reasonable mix of clue difficulties and types.

I’ve since written a handful of other puzzles that are in queues in Magpie and elsewhere, with my Mole Man of Hackney themed one (another niche theme – fortunately lightning didn’t strike twice) having leapfrogged Rum Doodle to be published here last year. Clue-writing does seem to get easier, quicker, and more enjoyable with practice. I’ve also found that when I come across an interesting bit of trivia, I often think “might that lend itself well to becoming a crossword theme?”, which is perhaps a sign of having got the setting bug.

Hopefully anyone who’s now solved two Rum Doodle themed puzzles will seek it out and give it a read (it has the added bonus of being fairly short) to see what the fuss is about. Annapurna is worth checking out too.

Posted on Thursday, June 13th, 2024 at 4:43 pm under Setting the scene.
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