Nobody asked for this post, but I do hear from a number of newer constructors that they have writer’s block working on their first cryptic. Totally understandable! I know clue writing even for a vanilla crossword is daunting to some folks, but at least with vanilla, you can be straightforward some of the time and not have to think carefully about every single clue. (And you can also look at clues others have done for inspiration.) With a cryptic, on the other hand, you’re striving for wit and deception with every single clue. Even if you’ve won the contest a time or two, coming up with 30 clues, many of which are for words that weren’t expressly chosen for their wordplay potential, is not easy.

I’m sharing my process here as the latest in my series on cryptic construction in case it’s helpful to others. Not everything I do will necessarily work for you, but I hope it helps somebody!

Step 1: Seeding and building the grid
I covered this bit in Post 2 of the series, but to reiterate: I always have a Google doc going with words and clues that I pick from for the contest or that I want to build a puzzle around. I usually pick no more than two seeds from this document. I don’t bother with grid design at all, because the Brits have pretty much already generated every possible legal permutation of 15×15 grid. I pick a grid from a giant book of Guardian puzzles I have, from a handful of screenshots I’ve saved from Times of London or Guardian puzzles online, or I do a Google image search for “Times cryptic crossword.” Then I put my seeds in, watching out for placement of letters in spots that are likely to limit fill potential. (For example, if a seed entry contains the letter I, I avoid placing the entry such that the I will be at the end of a crossing word of longer than 6 or so letters.)

I then fill the rest of the puzzle, taking care to look for fill that has high wordplay potential as I go (see Post 3 of the series for more on that).

Step 2: Keep the momentum
Although I never clue an entire puzzle in one sitting, the period when I fill the puzzle is the most fertile, in my experience, for coming up with clues. I think this is because I’m already thinking about clue potential at every step of filling the grid. If I’ve noticed a particularly interesting bit of wordplay, I’ll try to come up with a clue right then and there. If I can’t, I leave myself a note in the clue space, with lots of brackets or asterisks so I don’t mistake it for my having actually completed the clue. Example: For the entry APRICOT, I might leave myself the note ****APRIL curtailment plus COT.

Step 3 (and 4, and 5…)
I typically try to do 3 or 4 clues per puzzle, per sitting. If you do this every day, you’ll finish cluing your puzzle in 7-10 days. Sounds manageable when you put it that way, right?

For my first pass after I’ve filled the grid, I look especially for entries that have homophone potential. As a solver, I think homophones are the most under-used clue type: They’re often wonderfully funny to think through! I don’t want to overuse, naturally, but up to two in a puzzle is fine IMO, and if I’m not specifically looking out for them, I tend to gravitate naturally more to charades and containers.

I also make sure that each sitting includes at least one clue for a word that I expect to present more difficulty than the others (usually because it’s longer, but can also be because it has a lot of Scrabbly letters). If I just do the easy ones first, the process of cluing will get harder and harder as I go, and it’s harder to bring myself to finish.

What I’m not doing at this stage: Worrying about whether I am overusing any particular clue type or indicator word, with the exception of using whole-entry anagrams only as a last resort. This is especially true of longer entries — when you anagram an entire entry of 9 or more letters, generally the resulting anagrammed phrase isn’t going to be something that lends to a natural surface reading.

Last phase: Self-editing
Not gonna lie, this is my least favorite part of making any puzzle! Yes, if you have an editor you can rely on them to spot things you could’ve done better, but you will endear yourself to said editor if you make their job a little easier by not sending them your very first draft.

I always wait at least 3 days after I write the last clue for a puzzle before looking at it again. Then I look carefully at each clue: Is the surface sense as strong as I thought it was when I wrote it originally? If the clue has an indicator word, is there another indicator that would work better with the surface? If I anagrammed my way out of a difficult entry, is there other wordplay fodder I may have missed?

I don’t typically bother with these steps any more, but I did when I was less experienced, and I think they’re great for newer constructors:
1. Tally up your clue types to see whether you have overused one or more clue types. I used to do this with tick marks. I think it may have been Nate who suggested the wonderful idea of color-coding, if you have a good-sized rainbow of highlighters available to you (or a version of Acrobat that allows you to apply comments): Highlight anagram clues in green, homophones in pink, charades in yellow, etc. These are obviously arbitrary color choices and you can assign whatever color suits you, but whatever you choose, color-coding, as long as you are not color-blind, makes it immediately apparent if you’re leaning too heavily on a clue type.
2. Make a PDF of your puzzle, then search for common indicator words such as “first,” “head,” and whatever your personal favorite anagram indicators are. If you have used any indicator word more than once, now is the time to go back and replace the dupe(s) with something else.

You may also wish to have a friend test solve, but I think if you’ve done all this and you’re working with an experienced editor, the above is more than enough to feel good packing the puzzle off for editing. (Speaking from experience from the editing side, you may introduce an imbalance of clue types during the editing process while trying to fix other things — test solving is great for pointing that out!)