Behind the Scenes With Slate’s Crossword Editor
Slate has a new daily crossword! Editor-in-chief Hillary Frey recently interviewed Slate’s crossword editor, Quiara Vasquez, about what goes into editing puzzles, the ins and outs of the crossword community, and how she got here.
Hillary Frey: The idea of a crossword editor may be unfamiliar to lots of folks. Can you share with us everything that encompasses?
Quiara Vasquez: Before I became a crossword editor, I was a copy editor at a newspaper, and many of the responsibilities—fact-checking and/or spell-checking—are the same, just with puzzles instead of articles. There are also big-picture concerns, like making sure we don’t run two puzzles with the same long entry in the same week.
But I would say one of my biggest concerns when I edit these grids is to make sure these puzzles are approachable, not just in terms of difficulty but in terms of “vibe.” Everyone who solves puzzles knows that there are lots of entries that, owing to their vowel content, appear more often in puzzles than in real life; it’s unavoidable, given the constraints of the grid. (No, we’re not paid off by OREO.) But even though there’s nothing saying ODIE has to be clued as, like, [A spluttering canid of toondom], or a similar soup of “weird headline words,” you’ll find weird phrases like that all the time. We’re really big into describing things as “alternatives,” for instance. A brief peek at clues for BUS written for mainstream sources in the past six months pulls up [Train alternative], [Subway alternative], [Taxi alternative], and [Cab alternative]. (CABS, incidentally, can be both [Lyft alternatives] and [Merlot alternatives].) Who the hell describes a BUS like that? Far better to clue BUS with a phrase like [The wheels on it go round and round], as this Tuesday’s puzzle does.
Of course, in this regard, as in all regards, I am lagging behind crossword editor/demigod Erik Agard, who recently clued OMAN as [Only country that can legally follow Mexico in that game where you have to say something that starts with the last letter of what the previous person said].
How did you end up becoming a crossword editor?
I’ve been making puzzles for 20 years, technically. I recently unearthed the first puzzle I ever made, back in 2004. It was pretty good … for a 9-year-old, I mean.
But, like many of us, I got really into puzzles when I was laid off during the pandemic. At the time, there was a loose constellation of crossword blogs where people would post free puzzles every week or so; I sold and continue to sell puzzles to mainstream outlets, but it was in this indie scene where I really honed my chops and became a “name” constructor, on the back of a blog I started called QVXwordz. It’s from there that I got hired as an editor at AVCX, which had a long-standing connection with Slate (which syndicated its puzzle for a couple of years), which resulted in me getting hired here.
If my story sounds implausible, it really isn’t! I’d estimate something like half the crossword editors working today—including Slate’s own Sid Sivakumar; check out SidsGrids.com—got noticed by posting their puzzles on a random Wordpress. In this regard, puzzlemaking is surprisingly egalitarian, especially from this former journalist’s perspective. (The New York Times’ Arts and Leisure section is not in the habit of publishing 28-year-old Hispanic college dropouts.)
Tell us a little about the culture of the crossword community. Are there tournaments? Conventions?
Crosswords are thought of as a cozy domestic pastime, but there’s actually a sizable crossword tournament circuit, where contestants speed their way through increasingly grisly puzzles. The largest of them by far is the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, run by Will Shortz, which wrapped up its 46th installment earlier this month. (Big ups to Paolo Pasco, the 23-year-old victor—he’s another one of those Under-30s With Blogs who have seemingly taken over puzzles in the past five years.) But there’s a thriving minor league of tournaments across the Eastern Seaboard, all with their own unique vibe. Boswords in—where else?—Boston has events year-round but is much more chill than Harlem’s Lollapuzzoola, which is lovably unhinged (e.g., last year’s event had a “pin the tail on the donkey” puzzle, where competitors stabbed their grids with bobby pins). This year there’ll also be tournaments in the Bay Area (in June) and Chicago (in October).
I show up to almost all of these events and have firmly lodged myself in the not-quite-a-player category of competitors who solve at Mach 2 rather than Mach 3. (My fastest time on an NYT Monday grid is about 90 seconds. The aforementioned Paolo’s is half that. Some of us jokingly refer to our solve times in “Pascos.”) But in some ways, it’s relaxing to know it’s a foregone conclusion that Dan Feyer will whoop my ass. I’m really there for what, at this point, is a family reunion and a chance to hang out with some of the kindest and smartest people in America. I’d encourage anyone even remotely interested to give one of them a go! (Boswords’ Themeless League, which is totally online, would be a nice low-commitment place to dip your toes into that scene; the final night of the spring league, featuring a scorcher of a grid by Slate-approved megawatt crossword personality Anna Shechtman, was livestreamed on Monday—you can watch a recording if you missed it.)
Last, does being a crossword editor take any pleasure out of being a crossword doer? How do you balance that?
I used to solve something like 4,000 puzzles a year; this number has significantly dropped since I started working at Slate. Caleb Madison (the Under-30 With a Blog who now edits puzzles at the Atlantic) tells me this is pretty normal, and that we in the “editors club” don’t solve. But making and editing puzzles is a puzzle in and of itself, and forces me to think about language on a much deeper level than I did in my speed-demon days. I wouldn’t trade this job for anything.
