Learning To Take It Back
No, not my anti-Scrabble rant on CBC last Friday (starts at 23:40), which was based on this post. I recently learned the virtues of taking something else back.
I started doing crossword puzzles in high school when my mom got me a subscription to Games magazine, which was then edited by word-nerd legend Will Shortz. She thought that I might be just such a nerd, and she was right. I’ve done crossword puzzles regularly ever since.
From the start, I did them in ink. It started out as teenage showoff-iness (“I dont make mistakes when I solve.”), grew in to adult showoff-iness (“I don’t second-guess myself”) and settled into habit.
As I got better and better at them, I never timed myself or entered contests. The only yardstick I cared about was completing the puzzle. And I dabbled with others over the years, but always stuck with the New York Times crossword, which Shortz started editing in 1993. I eventually stopped doing any except the Friday and Saturday puzzles. My weekend now starts, no matter how hungover I might be, with NYT Saturday puzzle, which is nasty.
I usually get it done (with no Internet assistance, thankyouverymuch), but it ain’t pretty. At least one quadrant is usually totally illegible because of all the crossing out and over-writing I’ve had to do. I considered this a bit of a badge of honor, and never really thought that it might actually get in the way of my ability to solve.
And then I read a story about Dan Feyer, who sat down with the NYT Saturday puzzle and solved it in under six minutes. Granted, he’s the best in the world now, but that’s still way impressive. What stuck with me most from the article was this description of his solving technique:
He erased, and rapidly filled in more boxes. Then he paused, erased again, and resumed skittering. Nearly five minutes had passed and he still seemed to be working the top left corner of the puzzle, the very beginning. He mumbled once and erased three more times. Was he in trouble? He wrote something, looked up, put his pencil down.
Done. Five minutes, 29 seconds.
Could his success, my voiceover went, be somehow related to his ability to erase? Could it give him ideas, spark pattern matching, allow more experimentation, make it less likely that he’ll get locked in to unproductive approaches?
To answer these questions, and to shut up that annoying monologue, I sat down this past Saturday morning with the usual puzzle and shot of espresso, but an unusual writing implement — a pencil.
And I crushed it, comparatively speaking. Just had a much easier time when the grid was not full of ink blots, and when I could quickly and completely get rid of guesses that weren’t working out.
So I’m not doing hard puzzles in pen any more. And am advocating, with a convert’s zeal, letting go of counterproductive displays of ability, and acquiring some helpful humility. In crosswords, and probably in other areas as well.
