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Crossword Creativity

By Peter Lloyd

We can learn to innovate, invent, and be more creative from just about anything. Here are seven lessons I learned from working crossword puzzles.

1. Hang in There. No matter how hard it may be to solve, the beauty a crossword puzzle is that you know it has a solution. So do all real-life problems. Work hard enough and long enough and you will solve them. Lesson one, then, is to persevere.

2. Understand the Problem. Some problems do seem to be impossible to solve, because we haven't properly defined the problem. In much the same way, some crossword clues confound us. We generate lots of answers that just don't fit, because we struggle with the wrong meaning of a word in the clue. Crossword puzzle creators love to play with puns. A clue like "Go for the bronze?" for example, has nothing to do with the Olympics or metallurgy. The answer is TAN.

3. Attack from All Sides. No matter how formidable the problem, there's always more than one way to approach it. In crossword puzzles, some clues will be simply out of your league. So if you can't solve them head on, surround them. I had to solve three out of four vertical clues to answer the horizontal clue "54° 40' or fight" with POLK.

4 You Might Be Wrong. Don't fall in love with answers just because they fit the parameters and positively satisfy the criteria. Be willing to give up all solutions no matter how much you love them. Sure RUDDER satisfies the clue "Boat steerers," but so does TILLER, which happens to be correct.

5. Take a Break. Let your unconscious do some of the work. Go for a walk, take a nap, put your problem away until tomorrow. Then come back refreshed. Likewise, some of the most intractable crossword clues will become blindingly obvious after a break. "Shooting star, maybe" could be anything from METEOR to ANNIE OAKLEY, but they don't fit. The next day OMEN jumped right out at me.

6. Do the Work. There's tedium in most problem-solving enterprises. Don't shirk it. A crossword puzzle often leaves you with only one letter of a word missing and you still find yourself stuck. Before you go to a dictionary, go through the alphabet and try out all 26 letters in the blank box. _AVES was not enough for me to solve "Locales for some paintings," until I tried C.

7. Get the Information. If everything, including surrounding your problem, leaves you without a solution, get help. I found YENTL for "1983 Streisand role" in an online movie database after staring helplessly at Y_ _TL. Duh! If you're anything like me, though, looking up answers will always make you wish you had hung in there.

All of the examples above are taken from the New York Times Magazine crossword puzzle "Grid-Irony" by Victor Fleming and Matt Ginsberg, edited by Will Shortz, February 1, 2009.

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.
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