What Crossword Puzzles Can Teach Us

Like most people, I grew up tinkering with crossword puzzles—the easy ones in the back of TV Guide and the quickies designed for killing time in waiting rooms. But a few years ago I got hooked on New York Times puzzles. With my special puzzle-only subscription to the Times, I download a few every week and work on them at odd hours, usually during meals. And while I’m sitting there pondering clues, I often think about how much I learn from doing crosswords—and I don’t just mean the names of R&B singers (BLUCANTRELL) and silent-film stars (MAEMURRAY). Some of the lessons are a bit more metaphorical.

1) All knowledge is useful.

Lately I’ve been appalled to find that most of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” has fallen out of my head like so much crumbling plaster, yet the entire theme to Gilligan’s Island is still in there, maddeningly intact. But crossword puzzles are a great leveler—every fact counts, and pretty much everything you know, from horse anatomy to foreign swear words to Forrest Gump’s military rank, will come up sooner or later. So that makes it equally OK to browse People magazine (RACHAELRAY), eavesdrop on fishermen (STONEFLY), and brush up on your Egyptian board games (SENET). In the crossword universe—and, I like to think, in life—no knowledge goes to waste.

2) Your brain sees things differently on different days.

Sometimes I get stuck on a crossword answer that won’t come and won’t come, and I finally give up and put down the puzzle. Then I pick it up the next day, and that elusive answer pops out at me like one of those 3-D images in the Magic Eye books. It’s like some days my eyes can’t fill in the gaps and recognize the patterns, and other days they do it effortlessly*. There are two life lessons in this: 1) If you can’t solve a problem now, that doesn’t mean you won’t be able to figure it out later, and 2) If our eyes can make connections on some days when it couldn’t see them before, then maybe other things involving our “vision”—like intolerance, narrow-mindedness, and bigotry—aren’t set in stone, either. These too may change over time—perhaps suddenly, perhaps tomorrow.

3) Sometimes we’re wrong.

Once in a while, I feel like I’m cooking along pretty well on a section of a puzzle: I get one easy answer and a few others seem to fit, but then I get stuck and can’t fill in the rest around them. Much later, I figure out that my first answer—the one that seemed so obvious—is actually wrong. (It’s CAPEANN, not CAPECOD.) This reminds me of one of my favorite bumper stickers: “Don’t believe everything you think.” It also serves as a reminder that we all make mistakes—I do, and so does the driver who almost hit me this morning, the one I growled at and almost flipped off. And among all those mistakes we make, most of them aren’t deal-killers; nine times out of ten, we get to just fix them and move on (and question our assumptions next time).

4) Difficult things take time.

Times Sunday puzzles used to scare me just because they seemed so ridiculously hard. I’d sit there and look and look at the clues, and not one answer would come to mind. Frustrated, I’d toss the puzzle aside and go do something easier, like caulk the bathtub. But in time, I figured out the secret to doing the Sundays and their much harder brethren, the Fridays and Saturdays: simple, dogged persistence. To get started, I just have to figure out one word somewhere in the puzzle—the thin edge of the wedge. This often takes a while, but if I look at it long enough, I’ll at least be able to guess at one. And then, after I keep pushing at it and thinking and thinking and thinking on it—sometimes over the course of several days**—things start to happen. Patterns emerge, red herrings get tossed out, blanks get filled in. And then—pop—it’s done. And what a rush that is, to do something that seemed virtually impossible at first. I can’t speak for other puzzlers, but for me, there are no shortcuts to this—it’s just a matter of putting in the time and not giving up. This philosophy comes in handy in other difficult parts of life, like writing a novel, or finishing a project at work, or even recovering from an illness. In our fast-food, quick-cut culture, it’s easy to forget that some things have to happen in a series of small increments, not all at once. So we sometimes give up on a difficult task before we even take the first step. And then we never get the satisfaction of doing that hard thing—a thing was actually within our reach all along.

5) There’s more than one path.

Crosswords are a bit like religion, in that there are no one-size-fits-all rules. Some salesman in New Delhi may be plunking away on the same New York Times Sunday puzzle I’m working on right now, and so is the retired woman across the street from me, but that doesn’t mean we’re all doing them in exactly the same way. There are no classes where we learn this, no set of printed rules we have to follow. And in fact, one person’s “cheating” is another’s “standard procedure.” For example, my dad always kept a crossword dictionary next to his reading chair. But to me, that’s cheating, so I don’t own a puzzle dictionary. But I will, on occasion, look up an answer in a reference book if I’ve been stuck on that spot for days and I know I’ll never get it because, going one way, it’s “the city where Jonah preached,” and going the other way, it’s the aliens in Avatar***. But some would consider that illegal, and would never look up an answer. On the other hand, some people think it’s OK to peek at the answer in the next day’s paper or the back of the book, but to me, that’s the ultimate disgrace; I usually won’t look at the answer even after I’m done. If I’ve got a little fudgy spot that I’m not sure about—that IPAD might be an IPOD, and that Macedonian river might be misspelled as a result—that’s OK; I can live with it. The important thing to me is to finish the puzzle, even if it’s not quite perfect. I find it comforting—and subversive, in a way—that we’re all doing crosswords while adhering to our own completely arbitrary set of rules. We all get to the same place at the end, so what does it matter? Like I say, a lot like religion.

*Case in point, a couple of weeks ago: “She’s no naïf” ( - - M - - - - T - - - - - - - ) turned out to be WOMANOFTHEWORLD. It stumped me and stumped me, and then one morning I looked at it and could just see it. How my eye could piece that together from only two letters, I’ll never know.

**I recently did a stinker of a Saturday puzzle that took about a week. I had to break down and look up a couple of things, because there was no way I’d get them otherwise. One was the highest mountain in Australia—KOSCIUSZCO; the other was a 1902 Kentucky Derby winner named ALANADALE.

***NINEVEH and NAVI. One unfortunate thing about crosswords is that they point out the holes in your education, much like those Jeopardy categories that make you groan. Among my weak spots are the Bible, British royalty, and bloody Roman numerals, which trip me up every bloody time. I’m actually pretty good at James Cameron movies but have never warmed up to the cartoony blue people in Avatar.

Alan-a-Dale in 1902, with Jay Winkfield aboard.

4 Things Writers Love about Downton Abbey

It’s more popular than religion, it clogs up Facebook every Sunday night, and it’s an out-of-the-park homer for PBS. I know—what’s not to love about Downton Abbey? But there’s more to this show than scheming footmen, Maggie Smith’s one-liners, and “Bates is hot.” For writers, the show is a special pleasure because it hits on so many issues that authors grapple with all the time.

1) It’s a lesson in potboiler writing.

Like many bestselling authors, Downton creator Julian Fellowes keeps viewers engaged by employing two simple strategies that any fiction writer can use: delayed gratification and sudden setbacks.

       Delayed gratification sometimes plays out over entire seasons, with a desired result—Bates being cleared of the murder charge, or Matthew warming up to Mary—getting pushed farther and farther away as the complications mount and hopes are dashed. But Fellowes also uses this trick in miniature, teasing delayed gratification out of the smaller moments. Remember when Mary was trying to figure out whether someone in the house had mailed a crucial letter that would save the estate from ruin? She went to the servants’ dining room to ask the staff if anyone posted the letter, and no one had. She turned away, deflated, and the viewer’s hopes were thwarted too—what would happen to Downton now? But then Daisy, the kitchen maid, came into the room and asked what was going on—and it turned out she posted the letter, and all was saved. OK, it was manipulative, but notice that Fellowes didn’t give us an easy win even in this small scene; a delay of a minute or two stretches out the drama that much more and keeps us watching.*

       Then there’s the other side of the coin: While he’s delaying our gratification, Fellowes litters the show with unexpected setbacks and tragedies. Brides are jilted; people get sick and die. And while that kind of continual jarring would make most of us crazy in real life, in a story, it’s a surprise—and fun, in a roller-coaster sort of way**. It makes us wonder what’s around the next corner, and the next, and we keep watching to see what disaster will happen this time. So while Fellowes pulls us along on the rope of delayed gratification, he smacks us silly with sudden tragedy. And we like it, because it’s good storytelling.

2) It’s bubbliciously soapy.

Most Downton fans will guiltily admit that part of its attraction is that it’s a big soap opera—a serial about love and betrayal among a large cast of characters. So were Dallas and Dynasty (a friend used to call them Dallasty); so were ER and NYPD Blue and even the rebooted Battlestar Galactica, in its way—and so are countless successful shows on the air now. There’s a reason why TV writers draw from that well again and again: The serial structure hooks viewers, and the machinations keep them watching. Fellowes has avoided some old soap clichés—so far, we haven’t had any babies switched at birth or lovers who turn out to be siblings, though this season I smell a dead-person-who’s-not-really-dead (the heir in India?). But he has trotted out a few chestnuts like amnesia (the soldier with the burned face), villains who do evil just because they’re spiteful (Thomas and O’Brien), ill-starred lovers who have to overcome outlandishly complicated obstacles (Mary and Matthew), and the old standby of rich people who keep their cognac in glass decanters and are constantly in danger of “losing everything” and being forced to flee to their spare mansion, the little one with only 10 bedrooms.

3) Julian Fellowes is a late bloomer.

I have a soft spot in my heart for Julian Fellowes. I first noticed him when he was an actor on the BBC series Monarch of the Glen in the early 2000s. He played Kilwillie, the mischievous blueblood neighbor, and got stuck doing a lot of slapstick scenes. But he always played that character with zeal and a deliciously snooty accent. And it turned out that at the same time, he was quietly nurturing his career as a writer, penning the screenplay for Gosford Park that later won him an Oscar. He also wrote two bestselling novels. And his dual careers of acting and writing really took wing when he was in his 50s—older than I am now. I love that.

4) It ain’t Big Rich England.

These days, we’re plagued with a bevy of “big rich” reality shows—I call them “fat-lip shows”—like Big Rich Texas and The Real Housewives of This City That Will Not Surprise You by Having Rich Housewives in It. These shows take us inside the mahogany walls of America’s zillionaires and show us that 1) they rarely work, 2) they bicker constantly, 3) they fuss a lot about their appearance, and 4) they take a long time to eat dinner. Of course, Downton Abbey is like that too, but it’s all concocted by a writer***, which somehow makes it more palatable. And, hallelujah, it gives that writer a really good job.

           

* The creators of the sci-fi show Eureka had a similar storytelling trick that they called “the big button”: The heroes slave away through the whole show on a machine that will stop some looming disaster, and in the last act, just as all hell is breaking loose, they finish the machine and push the magic button—and nothing happens. Or something happens that appears to save the world, but that causes another disaster, and they have to solve that. By the end, the viewer is spent and satisfied from all the tension and release (and that connection between storytelling and sex, folks, is a whole other topic).

** I can’t imagine that it’s healthy to desensitize ourselves to tragedy like this all the time. It might explain in part why we’re willing to go to war and don’t step in to stop human rights violations. We accuse kids of being desensitized to violence through video games, but anyone who consumes popular entertainment—perhaps even novels—is in the same boat. Or is it good to have thick skins? Would we all die of fear if we weren’t toughened up by tales of little kids being cooked by witches and eaten by wolves?

*** Reality shows do employ writers, at least to edit the footage and make the “stories” hang together better for viewers. And writers for some of the game-show types, like Survivor and The Great Race, basically contrive the whole show. (Great article here on the inside scoop by a reality-show writer.) One show, Storage Wars, recently suffered a scandal when former star Dave Hester accused the producers of planting valuable items in the storage lockers to give an edge to some competitors and make the stories more compelling. I must come out here and admit that, scandal or no, I love Storage Wars—it’s one of my favorite guilty pleasures, and I’m squarely on Team Brandi. I was also a big fan of the tragic-in-retrospect Anna Nicole. One critic summed up my feelings about that show: “Why doesn’t somebody put down the camera and help her?”

The Museum of Lost Work Skills

The other day at work, I found myself pulling Post-it flags off of a big stack of papers and sticking them neatly back on the dispenser. This is an embarrassingly frugal bit of busywork that I do from time to time, both to save my employer money and to give my mind a rest when I’m particularly busy.

As I sorted the green flags from the yellow ones, a memory flashed through my mind: At my first job, back in 1979, I used to sort paper clips—a lot of them. I was 17, working as a receptionist for a magazine publisher. And when I was bored out of my mind, which was often, I would open my top drawer, pull out the week’s accumulation of paper clips, and sort the big ones from the small ones and put them in separate little bins. Thinking of this the other day, I had to laugh—I mean, there were times at that first job when I genuinely had nothing to do. This never happens now; even when I’m sorting Post-it flags, it’s just a pit stop in the middle of a racing workday. And that got me thinking about other things I did at that job back in 1979 that I never do anymore. Such as…

Typing mailing labels

I must have typed a million labels back then—truckloads, busloads, shitloads of them. The company was forever sending out sales letters, so day after day I’d sit there with mimeographed lists of addresses propped up next to my IBM Selectric typewriter. I’d set an accordioned ream of blank labels behind the typewriter, thread the top end of the strip into the platen, and type labels for hours, mindlessly copying names and addresses—probably full of errors, since I was a crappy typist. To this day, I can still remember the abbreviation for every state in the union; I know Alaska from Alabama, and Missouri from Mississippi*.

Telexing

This was one of the more glamorous parts of the job. A telex was a clattery, heavy machine that, through some technology that I still don’t understand, sent typed messages over the phone system—a sort of distant, overweight cousin to the fax machine. The telex machine stood on its own steel pedestal in a corner of the office far away from people’s desks, presumably because the vibration of the thing could knock your coffee cup across the room. The beauty of it was that it transmitted messages overseas instantly—a revolutionary concept at the time, much faster than mailing a letter and much more convenient than trying to phone people in Europe or Asia in the middle of the night. We had a lot of overseas customers, and I got handy at typing messages into the stiff keyboard and calling up telex numbers on the big rotary dial. I made some unusual penpals this way, foreign businessmen whose missives I would find printed out on the big roll of paper when I arrived in the morning. At a trade show I later met one of them, a charming Englishman who thanked me for all the helped I’d given him by presenting me with a bottle of my favorite perfume, White Shoulders (hey, I was a teenager). Another regular telex pal was a guy who worked for the government of a Middle Eastern nation**. I also got to meet him in person once, when he made a business trip to the U.S. It turned out that we were about the same age—a surprise to both of us—so we had dinner and went to a disco. It was fun. He was tall, wore a strong cologne, and had a great accent.

Using a postage machine

To mail all those letters that I’d typed labels for, I had to go into the back room and use the gigantic mailing machine—a Rube Goldberg contraption about the size of a refrigerator laid on its side***. It was festooned with belts and pulleys that hurtled your envelopes though a chamber, where it stamped the postage in red ink and shot them out the other side. But all those belts and pulleys turned out to be an OSHA nightmare: One day when I was posting a big stack of letters, I leaned over the machine to reach for something. Before I realized what was happening, a thick strand of my hair—waist-length, blond—got caught in one of the belts, disappeared down into the running machine, and began pulling my head in, closer and closer to the maw of the mangling gears. Finally, somebody had the presence of mind to pull the plug out of the wall and the whole thing stopped. But then I was trapped there, bent over with my head a couple of inches from the machine, until we figured out how to disentangle me. One co-worker gleefully grabbed a pair of scissors, but we held her off long enough to get the cover off the thing and loosen some of the belts, backing my hair out of there an inch at a time. It was all a good laugh; it wasn’t until much later that I learned that people used to lose their fingers, limbs, and lives all the time in industrial accidents just like that.

*AK, AL, MO, and MS, respectively. This is one of those vanishing skills, like long division and sock-darning, that only come in handy once in about 10 blue moons.

**My company published two magazines about aviation and the defense industry, and we ran a trade show. Our advertisers and exhibitors were everybody from major defense contractors to people who paved runways to government employees who bought Lear jets as gifts for dignitaries.

***One of my fondest memories of that job was taking the brain of the machine—the postage meter, a heavy control panel about the size of a lunch box—to the post office every couple of weeks to replenish its postage. I’d box up the meter in its protective plastic case and haul it down there, along with a check, and wait in line. Then a postal clerk would open the meter using wire cutters and a special set of screwdrivers and would reset the little dials inside. Then she would lock it up again using some steel wire and a lead slug that she’d squeeze with a tool that looked like a gigantic hole punch, pressing it into a seal with the U.S. Post Office emblem. It was almost always the same clerk, a Hispanic woman who had fantastically muscled forearms.

10 Uses for Your Clone

Food-allergy tester.

Commuter lane!

Alibi for felonies.

Best Pictionary team ever.

Job share.

Personal shopper.

Getting a good look at the back of your head.

“Me and My Shadow” dance act.

Disturbingly kinky sex.

Spare fingers.

Things I Miss About Racquetball

Gym bags and locker keys strewn in the hallway on the honor system.

The curious little flat handles on the doors.

The spongy spring of the ball on the racquet strings.

The three-beat rhythm of a ceiling ball.

Shaking hands with every opponent, whether I liked them or not, before and after each match.

“Kill for show, pass for dough.”

Stopping in mid-swing and saying, “Whoa—hinder.”

Calling a timeout by making a T with my hand and the racquet.

Wrapping my toes with adhesive tape before a match.

Being literally soaked with sweat.

Trophies.

Free Gatorade at the tournaments.

League standing sheets thumbtacked to the bulletin boards.

Friendly trash talk.

My friend Pedro saying, “Your face is as red as a radish.”

Figuring out my opponent’s weakness and then pounding on it mercilessly.

Playing “just one more game” with sore feet.

“Bad warm-up, good match.”

Being able to practice alone.

Supreme Athletic Club in San Carlos, “where everybody knows your name.”

Those spectacular ring-shaped bruises.

Taking a long, long drink from the water fountain.

You May Already Be a Luddite

I’ve never liked using the telephone. There’s something rude about making a bell ring in somebody’s house while they’re brushing their teeth or cooking dinner, and then expecting them to drop everything and talk to you about whatever’s on your mind.

But for a long time, phoning people up was my job. All through the 1990s, I worked in advertising sales, which involved spending hours on the phone with my clients, mostly musicians who ran small businesses out of their homes. On many occasions I rang somebody up at the odd hour and caught him eating, or drunk, or cranky from being roused out of a dead sleep (note to self: do not call musicians before noon). And there I was, chirpy-voiced, peppering this poor, half-dressed person with questions about his business plans and advertising dollars. I had to do it—mailing took too long, and there was always a deadline—but all that phone-calling seemed invasive and boorish.

And then came e-mail.

E-mail was like a miracle. Now I could send messages to my clients any time of day, and they could reply with a dignified response when they felt good and ready. It was so polite, so professional, so calming. Soon my friends and family got e-mail, and I loved that too. I could write them little missives in the middle of the night and get notes back from them in the morning. Sometimes the same night! I, a shy person, was becoming almost social.

But now the world has turned to texting. I tried it for a while, but it’s a pain to text on my little flip phone and I’m too cheap to buy a fancier one. And it irks me that texting is once again enslaving us to phones, when I just liberated myself from the damned things. I check my e-mail at work, at home, wherever there’s a computer, and I stay reasonably in touch with the world without having to carry a phone around and risk it ringing in the movie theater or falling in the toilet. But now some of my friends are almost impossible to reach via e-mail; they’re texters, and texts are what they respond to.

And just like that, I’ve been run over by the speeding bus of technology.

So now I’m in a strange vortex where my friends—not cleanly divided by age group—fall into the categories of texters, e-mailers, or phone people. So gathering a tennis group or setting up a writing workshop has become something akin to transferring a file from a PC to a Mac via some old diskette drive: Most of it gets across, but parts of it look funny, and parts of it don’t work. And a subtle pecking order is starting to assert itself: The sleek, on-the-go texters look down a little bit on us Luddite e-mailers with our clunky computers. And to us e-mailers, the phoners seem practically prehistoric, their voices crackling in the receiver like echoes of Alexander Graham Bell himself. And the phoners and texters are so far away from each other that they have to rely on us e-mailers, like some frantic middle sibling, to relay news between them.

I suppose in another 20 years we’ll be using some technology that we don’t even know the name of yet—we’ll all be snizzling or po-topping or gynorming each other to set a coffee date or blast the ex for forgetting to pick up the kid. Perhaps we’ll wistfully look back on these days of texting/e-mailing/phoning as a golden age, a technological Jerusalem where three different pillars of communication all coexisted in a sort of wobbly peace.

But for now, I have e-mails to send. And a message blinking on my answering machine. And I should probably turn on my iChat. And I can’t stop looking at those ads for the Kindle, the Nook, that new thing from Google, and the iPad and iPod Touch and iPhone with all their literal bells and whistles.

But before I do any of that, I need to clear my head. So I’m going to sit down and do a crossword puzzle. On paper. With a pencil. Because I like pencils. They’re so quiet and full of words.

Photo by Takkk