Anna Shechtman was one of the youngest female crossword puzzle creators to have a puzzle published in the New York Times. She has continued to break new ground by making the crossword puzzle scene more diverse, but has also had to deal with her own challenge with anorexia along the way.
The clue: Grande Dame of music.
The answer: Ariana
It is one of 31-year-old crossword constructor and journalist Anna Shechtman's favourite clues and reflects the changes she has been making to the crossword puzzle scene.
Anna now works for the New Yorker magazine, and with a PhD in English literature and film and media studies, she describes herself as a "very avid watcher of reality television," including the dating show Love Island.
She has always been determined to make crosswords more inclusive and use language that resonates with a more varied readership.
"Solving a crossword puzzle, there's a lot of joy in that moment of recognition when you see something you know reflected back to you in the newspaper grid," she says. "And so for me, it became a project of bringing that moment of recognition to more and more people who look and sound like me and consume the same sort of cultural artefacts that I do."
Historically, the world of crossword puzzle creators has been very male-dominated. Anna describes herself as part of a small generation of creators who are bringing a more diverse inflection of voices into it.
"I mean every crossword puzzle, in many ways, is an index of its maker," she says.
Anna grew up in Tribeca, in downtown Manhattan with her lawyer father, art historian mother and an older sister.
"It's a family that's very loving and also very sort of New York Jewish in all sorts of stereotypical ways," she says. "Debate and education were definitely prioritised and so our opinions and our ideas were always really valued from a very young age."
Anna with her older sister in 1995
She first fell in love with the crossword puzzle aged 14, when she went with her mother to the Angelika Film Centre, an indie cinema in Soho, to see a documentary called Wordplay, all about crossword puzzle constructors and devotees.
"The film really introduces you to the very eccentric members of the crossword world, and I had this strange moment of cinematic identification with them," says Anna. "You have to be a little bit touched to find creative inspiration in a 15x15 grid, and for whatever reason I felt their enthusiasm and their eccentricity pass through the screen.
"There was something about this key to something infrastructural or foundational about language - it was almost like magic."
Anna began creating American-style crossword puzzles, which differ from the UK grids.
"It's all about making sure that every single letter needs to be connected to two words in the grid, which is its own masochistic constructing process," she says. "Much different from the British-style crossword, where the difficulty is really making up those little riddles that encapsulate each clue."
Anna constructed all her crossword puzzles by hand using graph paper and "many, many dictionaries" until she was about 25.
"It's almost like words become a kind of maths equation and you have to make sure all the letters interlock on the page while still being real words. Now the process has become digitised and I started using this crossword-constructing software that everyone has been using."
As the software expedites the process, Anna thought of it as cheating for many years, despite it still requiring a great deal of human input.
"It was understanding basically that I was really making myself uncompetitive as a crossword constructor that I eventually started using the software."
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Source: BBC
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