Stella Zawistowski

Uri: How did you first get interested in crosswords? 

Stella: My crossword origin story is I first started solving when I was a junior in college, just trying to avoid doing work on my thesis. I would get together with a friend and we would solve together in the common room. It's been a long time since I needed to solve with another person, but that's how I got started solving. 

My first job out of college was in Connecticut, and the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament is in Stamford. I read about it in the newspaper and I thought it would be fun. The tournament website said “here's a sample puzzle, if you solve this in under 15 minutes you would be competitive at the tournament, and under 10 minutes is excellent. I solved the puzzle in nine minutes and 45 seconds, so I thought I was going to do great. 

What I learned is that the sample puzzle on the tournament page is the easiest puzzle in the tournament, and what they mean by “competitive at the tournament in 15 minutes” is that they take the puzzle away from you at the 15 minute mark. And the top solvers in the tournament probably have it done within four minutes.

And so that first year I got a very humbling score of, I think, 220th out of 330. I got so fired up and annoyed that I just started solving more puzzles and I became one of the top five solvers in the country, but it took a lot of work to get there.

After I had been on that path for a year or two, making a puzzle just felt like something that I wanted to try. And there are many more resources now for people who want to learn to make puzzles to find someone to teach them how, but at the time there wasn't a whole lot to learn from -- there's this book that had gone out of print a long time ago called The [Random House] Puzzle Maker's Handbook, and there was this one mailing list called Cruciverb that I ended up joining, but I struggled to make puzzles on my own.

But that, in that group, it was customary that when you got your first acceptance you would announce it to the group, and then they would congratulate you. So I did get a puzzle accepted at the Los Angeles Times, that was my first ever acceptance back in 2002, and someone responded to my announcement saying “Your grid is so good,” and I was like, really? Because I hate making grids. And he said, really? I hate writing clues. 

So I ended up working with that guy for about eight years together. We made well over 300 puzzles together in various publications. But by then it just felt more like work than fun, and so I decided to stop doing it in 2010 and I didn't construct again for almost nine years. 

I'd still been solving a ton of puzzles this whole time -- I think right now I’m up to 61 puzzles a week. I'd been part of the crossword community this whole time, I just wasn't making puzzles. And then in 2019, after a couple years of the conversation in puzzles going why aren't there more women making puzzles? Why aren't there more people of color making puzzles?, and I was one of the people complaining about it, and then I thought maybe I should try to fix it.

I ended up asking another friend in the puzzle community – Andy Kravis, who’s now the puzzle editor at the New Yorker – to give me a tutorial, and so I started making puzzles by myself, which I find a lot more fulfilling than working with a partner. Now I get to choose what goes in the grid. Especially since on the clue side you don’t always have full control. To a lesser extent now, but certainly in the early aughts when I first started making puzzles it was very common for a puzzle editor to just rewrite half or more of the clues. And if I was the clue-writing half of the equation then it just felt like there wasn't a whole lot of me left in that puzzle by the time the editor got through with it. 

And so now I feel like the puzzles that I make represent me and the things that I enjoy and want to share with other people more than the puzzles that I was making then.

Uri: This is a great segue to ask, how would you describe your grids? Who might especially like a Stella Puzle?

Stella: So someone told me at the last puzzle tournament that there’s a locus of things that I like where nobody else that has that particular locus. I'm really into fashion, and literature, and classical music -- fashion especially is historically underrepresented in crosswords. So there's that bit of highbrow. But also I love drag -- I watch every season of Drag Race, including all of the international ones. And I also lift weights, so there's a little bit of that in there too. 

I remember one of my solo puzzles in the New York Times, I liked that they let me keep the clue important calculation for a weightlifter for LOAD – other people might clue LOAD with reference to a loading dock, but not with a weightlifting reference.

So if you like lifting heavy shit, or if you like things that would show up in Vogue magazine, or if you like to go to art museums or classical music concerts, you should solve my puzzles.

Uri: That's awesome. You're also famous for writing clues that are on the harder side -- your own website is called Tough as Nails. Tell us a little bit about your stance on crossword difficulty.

Stella: I started Tough as Nails in part because I used to spend a lot of time on social media shouting that the Friday and Saturday New York Times puzzles have gotten easier in the last 10 years, and that's not a good thing. (I’ve stopped doing this because I realized that I'm shouting into the void.)

I’m one of the fastest solvers in the world, so it's really hard to force me to spend more than five minutes -- honestly more than four and a half minutes usually -- on a standard daily size crossword puzzle. The Sunday ones take me a little longer than that because they're bigger, but not a lot more. And like many people I got into puzzles, and got addicted to puzzles, for that aha moment, when you've been struggling at something and then you figure it out, and I don't really have that anymore, and I want it back. 

So I want there to be more hard puzzles in the world, and I also want there to be more puzzles by women in the world, and so the name Tough as Nails was chosen in part so that I could have that manicured hand in my logo, even though I don't ever get manicures myself because working with a barbell ruins them, but I love a hard puzzle.

That being said, the world also needs more easy puzzles, because that is how people get into puzzles in the first place. I would say that I'm good at both ends of the spectrum: I can make a good hard puzzle and I can make a good easy puzzle, it's the middle I find difficult! Some people might be surprised to realize that the venue that I am most often published in is USA Today, which has fun, easy puzzles. I enjoy it! That's not my favorite thing to solve, but it is a really fun thing to make.

Uri: Wonderful. So you mentioned you're one of the fastest solvers in the world -- can you give any tips for our readers who, like me, are not the fastest solvers in the world? 

Stella: The most obvious answer, but it is the one that works, is just to do more puzzles. Some people ask should I study lists of words to be better at crossword puzzles? Don't study lists – it's not like Scrabble, where part of being good at Scrabble is just memorizing a lot of words so that you're able to look at your tile rack and immediately think of a bunch of possibilities. (I'm actually not that good of a Scrabble player either, which surprises some people). 

Whereas with puzzles there's more of a knowledge component to it; there are words that show up repeatedly because their vowel and consonant patterns make them very useful for crossing, but it's still not great to memorize them. It's just that as you solve more puzzles you'll start to recognize, oh, here's a pattern that shows up a lot, I bet it must be this word. Or you'll start to remember who Elia Kazan is, the director -- if you didn't know who he was before, you sure will after you've solved a lot of crosswords, because it's a useful combination of letters, and there's nobody else named ELIA who is famous enough to have multiple clues. 

So that's the number one thing I would advise: if you're a beginner, if you're not doing a puzzle every day, do a puzzle every day. If you don't feel up to doing a full size puzzle every day, there are so many options now for smaller puzzles.

But also if you are a pretty darn good solver, but you want to be even better, the trick that got me from top 50 to top 10 is that I started to solve easy puzzles without looking at the across clues; this is called Downs Only Solving. Just cover the across clues with your hand. The first few times you do this, it will be very difficult. But what will happen after a while is your pattern recognition skills will start to get better. Because you won't be able to solve the puzzle entirely from the down clues, there'll be just a few clues that you don't know, so you're going to have to guess what the crossing word is based on the letter patterns.

And eventually you'll be like, oh, I see E blank I E, that is almost certainly Lake ERIE. (It could also be Elie Tahari, the designer). The more you do this, the better your pattern recognition will become, and the more you will be able to solve any crossword without needing to look at every single clue.

In the end, the first time that you go back to solving the normal way after you've been solving downs only for a bit, it feels like cheating. 

I realize I'm giving advice that’s like “if you want to be better at drinking wine, just chug it really hard;” I'm actually suggesting that you not pay attention to half of the hard work that a constructor did, but if your goal is to solve faster, that's what you do.