Quote Crosswords (3 of 4)

Gridsetter, quote thyself!

As I went over last time, crossword format puts a lot of demands on quotations that were never designed to be in crosswords. They need to divide up in a way that’ll match the symmetry of the design. They should have their biggest punchline at the bottom but be interesting throughout. They should be guessable, and yet they should strike solvers as clever. They should fit into a design that gives them a lot of easy words to intersect with.

It’s a long list!

And since quote crosswords are unpopular today, the pressure on a quote to meet those demands is greater.

So what about quotations that were designed to be in crosswords? Nothing about the format demands that it pull its quotes from elsewhere. And a few crosswords have run unattributed material. Although the line between what’s truly original and what’s just a familiar dad joke can be thin:

When I was writing about the subject some time ago, I called these quip crosswords, as opposed to quote crosswords—since they weren’t quoting anyone else and tended to be quippy. And I wasn’t the only one using the term. But a lot of people don’t observe much of a distinction, and I’ve seen “quote” and “quip” used more or less interchangeably in crossword clues. “17. Part 1 of a quip by Mark Twain…”

A lot of people don’t make that distinction in their solving experience, either. In either case…well, we’re not talking mass protests, but seasoned crossword critics tend to say they’d rather see something else. They’re pretty gentle about it, usually. Except for Rex Parker.

I could’ve included a quote from Rex about how little he enjoyed some other quote puzzle…but that felt like stirring up trouble for its own sake. And I’ve done enough of that.

Still, as I contemplated a quote or quip theme for the Q puzzle, I had a lot more hope of making a passage that would fit in the given space than finding one.

As you can see from the above, writing in the circular format is a modest challenge, far from impossible. Writing in a Q-shaped format would only be a little more so.

Still, I couldn’t just write any old thing as the theme answer for the crossword, and that’s where the trouble came in. Writing something that felt worthy of all the time it could take to solve the Q? That would be a marathon, and I was already pushing my brain power pretty far just to get the crosswords laid out.

With the benefit of hindsight, I might’ve tried to compose some hip-hop lyrics about why crosswords—or this crossword in particular—are so great. It’d be a variation on what Jay-Z calls “the most familiar subject in the history of rap—why I'm dope.” And I do admire what’s been done with the density of rhyme and wordplay in that genre.

But in the end, it wasn’t just intimidation that drove me to go in another direction with Q. There was another kind of quote theme that I hadn’t seen anyone try but that had piqued my interest for years, and I was never going to get a better chance to do it than this one. But while the Ubercrosses are usually about thinking bigger than other crosswords, this idea was about thinking smaller.

(Concluded tomorrow.)