Joel Fagliano has always thought about puzzles. His father was an avid solver of the famed New York Times Crossword and would photocopy it every weekday for his son to solve on the train to school. When Joel was in 10th grade he started designing his own puzzles, submitting them to the NYT’s crossword editor, Will Shortz. “They were… quite bad,” he jokes. But Shortz offered him feedback and when Joel was 17, he had his first puzzle published in the paper. Later, when Joel was at college, Shortz took him on as a summer intern and the two started working on the crossword together, the master sharing his knowledge on the arcane intricacies of puzzle authorship.
In August 2014, the NYT’s product director Matt Hural started an experiment – a small, five by five word puzzle to go alongside the main crossword on the paper’s new digital platform. Joel was given the job of writing it, and he’s been in charge of the Mini ever since. At first the Mini was controversial with NYT puzzle purists, but under his careful tenure, it has become a huge success on the paper’s app, bringing in millions of solvers a day, attracted by its brevity, topicality and sly misdirections. But how does Joel keep the concept so fresh, and what does it take to make a puzzle a day?
Eurogamer: So you interned with Will Shortz for three summers. What was it like to work with this NYT puzzling legend as a young fan?
Joel Fagliano: It was amazing. It was like being a basketball player and getting to train with Michael Jordan. Pretty quickly you realise he’s just a normal, friendly guy who just happens to have a ridiculous puzzle brain. We sort of edited puzzles side by side, I would act as his sounding board. He would throw out ideas, we’d be pitching things back and forth. And just seeing the process of how he thought through the difficulty level of a clue, how a solver might process a clue, how we might misdirect a solver with a clue – that helped me hone my own style.
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Tell us about your authoring process. Do you work on one puzzle at a time or are you working on multiple Minis at once? How long does each one take?
With the Minis, I can make them a lot more quickly than I can a full-size fifteen-by-fifteen daily crossword, partly because one of the hardest things to think of with the bigger crosswords is the theme of the puzzle – what connects all the longest answers together. The Minis don’t always have that. Sometimes they’re just about getting a smooth interlock of words, all of which will be familiar to my audience. I might also put in a couple of words I can clue in a fresh or interesting way. I’m often just working on one puzzle at a time and I work about one week in advance. That allows me to work things in from the news: if someone wins a Best Picture Oscar or something, that can appear in the puzzle.