So What’s the Deal on Making ECrostics?
by
John Kiernan
I haven’t been making Acrostics for very long, but I’ve been solving them for as long as I can remember and thought I’d give you – the possible new Acrostic maker – some of my thoughts, opinions and tips. They’re worth exactly what you’ve paid for them and I’m sure other people have widely divergent opinions on the subjects touched on here. Hopefully, this document might spur others to add their two cents.
Firstly, I’m a big believer in the adage that a difficult puzzle is not necessarily a good puzzle. I look to the expert in this field – which I believe to be the New York Times. The Sunday Times Crossword is beloved my millions, but it is not – by far – the most difficult puzzle you’ll ever run across. However, it is a challenge and I feel the level they found was that a person with a decent education (college level, but possibly without the degree) should be able to solve it – given enough time.
In many ways, it’s more difficult to make puzzles that do not contain incredibly difficult words, as those words often contain the letter combinations the puzzle maker would desperately like to unload. However, in the long run, the puzzle solver will appreciate you more if you spend the time to make a decent puzzle that doesn’t include words like ‘syzygy’ (look it up).
For me, I believe the other aspect of a good puzzle is one that contains a diversity of knowledge. I like to throw in words from psychology, physics, as well as phrases from great verse and literature. However, I will also expect the solver to know current actors, and even hip hop musicians and lyrics.
If they ever get around to giving Nobel Prizes for puzzle making software design, I plan to nominate David Howorth for his Ecrostic Maker. I was always daunted to try designing Acrostics because it seemed like an almost impossible task. How Thomas Middleton did all those N.Y. Times Acrostics without software baffles me (he used Scrabble tiles, I hear). The fact that they only ran once every two weeks gives you some idea of how hard it must have been!
First, if you do not have access to the Internet, puzzle making will have an added difficulty factor. I have done it – while on planes for example – but I invariably need to come back to my trusty ‘Net to verify my clues and check other facts.
Finding the quote: To my mind, I feel the key to a good puzzle is a good quote. Humor is not necessary, but I like to use cleverness as a rule, although I have also used other great monologues and speeches I have heard. Length is going to be an important determining factor. Some people do very short puzzles, which can be fun for those in a hurry. I myself often do ones that are relatively short quotes from my favorite humorous writers (Twain, Shaw, Mencken, etc.). If they are short, I usually add a ‘-LET’ to the title to let the possible solver that it’s not a long puzzle. Other people like full quotes from books and some are often quite long. It’s a judgment call, though there’s probably some maximum to a puzzle – although my beliefs have changed towards this. I’ve done some really long ones lately that have been quite fun. Lately, I have branched out into other areas for quotes, such as films. Also, the New York Times has the First Chapters of a lot of recent books on their website. Project Gutenberg has also put most of the classics up on the ‘Net as well.
Visible characters: ECM allows you to include certain characters in your quote. I personally like it, although purists might argue that a true Acrostic doesn’t have punctuation. You need to enter the characters on the ‘Prelim’ page if you wish to paste in the quote from an outside source and expect the punctuation to ‘hold’. The longer I am around, the less punctuation I tend to insert in my puzzles. In fact, I’m tempted to go back and remove some from my puzzles. To me – today – I stick to apostrophes, dashes, and occasionally quotation marks in there is a quote in the middle of the longer quote. Every once in a while I see someone put in numbers. (Arrghhh.)
Layout: I think a normal layout makes the puzzle look normal and often David as an editor will tweak this and I don’t have a problem with it. I think you can choose how many rows you want, but I tend to think if it looks normal, it’s okay.
Author/Title/Wordlist: If your quote is from a book, your options here are limited. Realize that what you put in this area determines how many vertical entries the puzzle will contain. Too small and you’ll have a hard time squeezing in the letters (or at least your options are more limited). Too long an author and title and you get into the too many words with too few letters type of puzzle. (It might be easy to make, but not necessarily fun to solve.) If a book title is long, you can truncate it and fill in the full title in the area that displays when the user solves the puzzle. If the author’s name is long, you can use just the last name. You can be pretty assured you have to at least include the last name of the author. Sometimes I need to lengthen this area, so I will also use the middle name or initial. In the case of film quotes, I sometimes use the actor’s name and other times I use the character’s name. By the way, this means the quote must contain the letters of your author’s name (and the source name) or you’re in deep trouble. (I had a great quote from P.J. O’Rourke, except not one word in the quote contained a ‘K’ so I was out of luck!)
If you have chosen a quote from another source, you can get more creative with this area. I have seen quotes from various famous people, as well as monologues from films, etc. In this case you might do something like ‘TWAIN ON DISHONESTY’. The good thing about this is that if you are getting truly stuck, you can change it to ‘TWAIN ON HONEST MEN’.
Choosing the words: This is obviously where the rubber hits the road. The key here is to hopefully have lived a decent amount of years and have a decent amount of trivia and knowledge in your head. However, the internet (well, reference books at least) will become invaluable after a relatively short time.
Important note: ECM gives you the ability to hook a ‘Dictionary’ to it, or rather a word list. If you have this and hit the ‘Suggest’ button, a list of words will pop up – filtered so that only the words you can use are shown! This is invaluable, especially as you near the end of the puzzle and are desperately trying to fit the remaining letters into the spaces. This list is good, but only if you want a single word. It doesn’t do phrases.
I try to start by looking at the letters I have available to me. This is important, as you must make sure you ‘take care’ of certain letters early, because it becomes problematic if they’re left around near the end of your puzzle. Being left at the end of your puzzle with three ‘X’s, two ‘Q’s and a ‘Z’ and no vowels makes you have to think that perhaps you should have planned better. As a rule, I try to make some of the longer word groups early – and I often use book or film titles – or famous peoples’ names. Another reason for doing longer quotes early comes from wanting to get the remaining word length down to a decent level. On one of my puzzles, I started out with an average word length of 13 characters. That’s not bad early on, but wait until you get down to the last few words! In that case I used a few long clues (long film titles, recognizable quotes, etc.) to bring the average remaining word length down to a reasonable level.
Word Combinations: As the letters start to diminish, I often find myself looking at word combinations that can be used. The more I do puzzles, the more I try to avoid word combinations unless they are parts of recognizable quotes or idiomatic expressions.
To me, just throwing together random words and then making a clue that utilizes them is – well, not cheating, but sort of. On the other hand, using a combination of words that can be found in a quote from a work of writing is fair game (in my humble opinion). For example, if I have the words ‘Tree’, ‘Spreading’ and ‘Chestnut’ and I put them together as ‘ChesnutTreeSpreading’ with a clue of ‘What using a Chesnut Girdle prevents’ it’s a bit cheesy. However, rearranging it to be ‘SpreadingChesnutTree’ and make the clue ‘Under the –‘ (3 words, Longfellow) transforms it into a legitimate quote from literature (‘The Village Smithy’).
If you’re having trouble finding word combinations that are natural, there are a number of Idiomatic expression sites on the ‘Net, the one I use is ‘The Idiom Connection’ at http://www.idiomconnection.com .
A last note on word combinations: Often you end up with a number of word combinations in your puzzle. When you’re done take a look at them and see if you can swap them around to make for better combinations. If you have ‘Back Home‘ and ‘Sweet Room’, perhaps swapping them to make ‘Sweet Home’ and ‘Back Room’ will yield better word/clue combinations.
As the letters get scarce or the words filled: Some helpful hints are to add suffixes to words, if you can. Got an ‘S’ left over? Time to make something a plural! The same can be said with ‘ED’ and ‘ABLE’, etc.
This is a maze, back out!: Every once in a while, you get down to having only a few letters left and you just can’t make them fit. But you are sooooo close! Well, the answer is that after you’ve banged your head against the bad end of the maze enough, you realize you have to back out and try going down another branch. That means you might need to erase a number of words to accomplish this feat. Before you do, look at the letters you have left. Got a lot of consonants? Erase a few words that are heavy in vowels. That will let you try combining the letters in a hopefully better way.
Nothing feels as good as dropping that last letter into place and looking over at the blank column where the letters used to be!
Clues: For me (and it’s a personal opinion here) I feel diversity is the answer here. Think out of the box when it comes to clues. If you have ‘said’ as the word, you can always go with ‘declared’ or something mundane like that, but how about something about Port Said in Egypt? Look at the word and perhaps use on of the more obscure references. Recently I had the clue word ‘number’ and could have used it in terms of the root to numeric (or the like), but chose instead to use it as in ‘more numb’. Of course, this depends on what the rest of the words look like. If you have a bunch of hard clues, it probably doesn’t hurt to throw the solver a bone or two to keep them from getting discouraged early on. I also try not to have words duplicated within the same puzzle – but that’s just me. Also, if I have one criticism of myself is that I spend a lot of time getting the puzzle to work and then I blow through the making of the clues part. I have been trying to remember lately that it’s fun to come up with good clues, as well as the answers. I especially like using short clues that can mean a bunch of different things (i.e. ‘bridge’ – is it the kind that goes over the river or the card game or the musical reference or even the part of the ship?).
As to making clues, as I mentioned, using reference sources will help you on word combinations and phrases. To do this, I use a variety of Web sites. Here are a few:
Google: The advanced ‘Google’ helps you with words and phrases because you can put them together well. The Advanced version (press the ‘Advanced ‘ link and perhaps save it on your Favorites list) allows you to enter phrases directly. If you’re using regular Google, just put quotes around what you want it to search for as a phrase (i.e. ‘Spreading Chestnut Tree’). In this way, you can sometimes find if the phrase you’re using is in a famous work or quote somewhere. I’ll often add ‘Quote’ (to see if there’s a quote using this phrase, or ‘lyric’ or ‘amazon’ (to see if it’s part of a book title that might be well known).
Important Note: Check carefully to make sure your sources have it right. In the aforementioned Longfellow poem I thought it was “Under a spreading chestnut tree” and a Google search of that phrase pulled up 375 matches so I thought I was okay. However, I had gotten it wrong and when I checked again for “Under the spreading chestnut tree”, I got 2700 matches! The lesson? Double check these things carefully as you go, because it was a pain to fix when everything else was in place at the end!
Bartleby.com: This is a wonderful, all purpose reference site. It has areas for Literature, Thesaurus, Verse, etc. The only drawback is you can’t search on word strings, but you can put more than one word in the search, but you get every occurrence where both words exists, so it doesn’t winnow it down as much as Google.
LyricFind.com, LeosLyrics.com: Search huge lists of songs for the occurrence of a phrase in them.
Bible Searches: http://bible.lifeway.com/crossmain.asp and http://www.online-literature.com/bible/bible.php both help you search on Biblical phrases. Allows your ‘The’ to become a ‘Thee’ or ‘Thou’!
Foreign Language phrases: There are many web sites that will give you exact meaning of phrases from foreign languages, including Latin. Remember, however, that it’s a short step from a familiar Latin phrase to an obscure Estonian one!
Country specific phrases: Recently, I put in a quote concerning an IRS form. I had a puzzle solver from Europe remind me that this is a website, and thus automatically international. It was a good point and as a result I try not to use clues that include things like IRS form names. It’s still always going to be a little specific to where you were raised, just something to keep in mind.
Anagrams: At ‘A2Z Word Finder’ (http://www.a2zwordfinder.com/index.html) they have an anagram utility that will allow you to plug in leftover letters to see what real words they can make. Another helpful thing it you’re stumped. While the Dictionary usually accomplishes the same thing, this helps you on second and third words in a clue (i.e. you have already put in ‘new’ and want to see what you can add to that with the remaining letters).
Acronyms: Let me preface this section with the word ‘ptui’! As much as possible I stay away from acronyms, unless they’re relatively well known. But if you get stuck and need to see if that jumble of letters you have left would make a known acronym, there is a site at http://www.ucc.ie/cgi-bin/acronym (University College in Cork, Ireland).
Final words of wisdom: You might want to work on at least three of four puzzles simultaneously. In this way, if you get frustrated on one, you can switch over to another. It is better to take a little extra time to produce a good puzzle than rush a bad one out! Also, if you are not American, realize your references phrases might not be understood by Americans, even if they are in English. I can breeze through the N.Y. Times crossword on most days (okay, not Saturday), but can hardly do the London Times puzzle at all because of the use of many phrases and trivia peculiar to England.
A specific analysis of making a puzzle: Now that I have almost 200 puzzles under my belt (I began writing this document with less than 50 completed), I have found some methods that work well for me. They are not perfect – and some people may disagree with my methods – but I’m happy with them.
Average Word Length: Interestingly enough, this is a vital number for constructing puzzles. I have found that the lower this number, the easier the puzzle to make. Obviously the caveat here is if it’s too low you end up with a puzzle that’s easy to make, but probably not fun to solve, or possibly too easy.
What’s the magic number? For me, I aim to have the average number come in between 7 and 12 when I first start the puzzle. If I start out at that length, I can usually get through the puzzle relatively well. I can also get through it if the number is higher, but certainly not a lot higher than 14-15. For the most part, I do this mainly by eyeballing the quote while poring through my sources. About 75% of my quotes are inserted with no ‘fiddling’.
Fiddling about: How do you get a puzzle to have this starting average length if the quote you’re looking at is long? The average has to do with the quote and the title line. It is based on the total letters in the quote divided by the number of letters in the title line. To me, both of these are variables with which the constructor can ‘monkey’.
This is where puzzle purists will gasp. Feel free to do so, if you are of that ilk.
A puzzle purist will say, insert the quote and then put in the author and the title of the work. If the combination there doesn’t work, you’re out of luck. And if you feel this way I understand and applaud your purity. However, I have tried to keep up a certain production schedule for puzzles (for my own weird reasons), and that causes me to allow both the quote and title line to be somewhat ‘flexible’.
Allow me to clarify one thing: I do not insert my own words into the quote, nor do I change the quote substantially. However, I might shorten the quote by taking out an extraneous word, phrase or sentence. In many cases, I think the quote is improved for the format into which it has been inserted – a short pithy puzzle quote.
While changing a quote is rare for me, the other place I ‘play’ with the puzzle is on the title line. Sometimes all I have is a quote from a famous writer (i.e. Twain, Mencken or Shaw). In a case like that, I am afforded more flexibility in that I do not have the title of the original work. True, I could delve into research to find that, but often that is exactly counter-productive. By having no source, I can expand or contract my title line to suit my needs. Many puzzle constructors do this already by shortening or lengthening authors’ names (instead of ‘Twain’ they use ‘Samuel Langhorne Clemens’). In this case I might have ‘Twain on the American Public’. Often I need to decide how much of the author’s name to use, as it might contain letters I don’t have (you’d be surprised how many Mark Twain quotes have no “K” in them!)
Making the puzzle: First thing to do – double check the quote! Say it out loud if need be as you might have left a word out. Then double check the author/title line. Once you’ve done this… do it again! I finished a whole puzzle recently, only to realize when looking at it that I misspelled the author’s name! Arrgghhh!
Having satisfied myself I’m working with a good quote and title line, I’m ready to start. I have gotten the quote and the title the way I want it (to give me the right average word length), so the first thing I do is look at my average word length. I tend to work in a decreasing word length manner – as smaller words near the end are easier to ‘plug in’. Thus, if I have a puzzle with an 11.2 average word length, I want to get that number down. To do this, I usually put in clues that are either quotes, idomatic phrases or longer titles of works and/or full names. I continue doing these phrase and/or name words until I am under about 9 (average word length). From there, I tend to use the dictionary to help me find larger words (that are recognizable) to ‘plug in’ to the empty word spaces. As I continue to decrease the average word length, I tend to start ‘eyeballing’ the letters left – watching especially for a large amount of problematic letters (‘U’, ‘J’, ‘W’, ‘Q’, ‘X’, etc.). I find ‘X’s and ‘Q’s easy to get rid of if I have words that start with an ‘E’ as there are a lot of ‘Ex’ and ‘Eq’ words (the latter providing I have a ‘U’ – if not, start looking to words, names or places from the Middle East!).
My last words are usually the short ones. I try to not have any three letter words, but I often find myself with one or two. I will sometimes look back at some of my longer phrases or words to see if I can move things off the longer words to bolster up the shorter words to get a four or five letter word instead of a three letter word.
When I have finally laid in my last word, I go back and look at the puzzle as a whole. I then try to ‘mix up’ the words, so that I don’t have any large ‘clump’ of big words or small word (i.e. words A-H are all 15 letters long while words I-T are all 4 letters long). This is easily accomplished by ‘moving’ words around. For example, if I have three long words to begin with and the middle one starts with an ‘E’, I look for a another clue that starts with an ‘E’ (that is short) and swap them out. This helps ‘balance’ the puzzle.
Finally, I insert the actual ‘clues’, enter the name of the puzzle in the heading (along with my name and address) and run the cross reference (X-Ref). Sometimes, if it is a long puzzle, this might take a while, but I have only rarely had it go into an infinite loop (read the text on the box that pops up on the ‘Xref’ for more info on that phenomenon).
And that’s it! And now it’s your turn…..
Good luck in your puzzle making!
John Kiernan