Patrick Berry has the ultimate cocktail-party job. Whenever he finds himself with a group of strangers, holding a glass of melting ice cubes in sweaty palms, someone will ask him what he does for a living, and Berry almost always has the most interesting career in the room.

He writes crossword puzzles for the New York Times.

Patrick Berry is a cruciverbalist, the formal title for a puzzle writer, and, yes, he pays his mortgage by doing so. His office attire is often a T-shirt and faded khakis. But Berry is quick to add that he doesn’t just spend his day firing off creative blasts of wordplay. In fact, if he were to start explaining the ins and outs of his job, the conversation would quickly devolve into esoterica: databases, 180-degree symmetry, black and white square counts. Not so exciting, Berry thinks.

But Berry’s day at the office results in a test of America’s intelligence and ingenuity; crosswords are a simple cultural brainpower assessment much like a Rubik’s Cube. Can you finish a Sunday New York Times puzzle? Do you use a pencil or a pen?

Just over a year ago, Berry followed his college professor brother here to Athens from Chapel Hill, NC, and he’s been living an unassuming, work-from-home life ever since. His house is shaped like the first letter of the alphabet, spartanly decorated with a wordsmith’s necessities: a coffeepot and bookshelves.

Berry graduated from Orlando’s Rollins College with a degree in computer science in the early ’90s, but it’s words, not ones and zeros, that enthrall him. He has a devotional love affair with the English language and quotes Mark Twain when describing the awesome power of words: “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

After college, Berry took a job in the desktop publishing business. He settled in Chapel Hill and continued constructing puzzles as he became increasingly dissatisfied with the corporate world. He honed his skills selling puzzles to Games magazine throughout the ’90s. Following an employment shake-up in 1998, Berry leapt into full-time puzzle construction, a decision that meant devoting a year to building a word and phrase database—an essential tool for any word puzzle maker.

A Puzzle’s Progress

What does a database have to do with crosswords? Themes and clues are the stars of the puzzle, but it’s the database that performs the grunt work. Every year, Berry spends time grooming his database, chopping through lists, phrases and clever definitions in order to keep his puzzles fresh and relevant. Berry’s database contains a couple hundred thousand entries, which he recently began ranking according to quality. Words that contain rarely used letters such as Q or X, or those that have particularly good clueing potential, will receive a high rating; words like eel—short words that contain common letters and are difficult to clue creatively—receive a low rating. His quality indication system isn’t finished yet, and won’t be any time soon. Fully rating his entire database would be like entering a “black hole of time” similar to 1998—the initial year of word-logging and a period he’s not willing to revisit.

If evaluating your ammunition is the crucial first step to becoming a cruciverbalist, the actual first step to puzzle writing is an entirely different test: developing the theme.

Themes require time to brainstorm and must come first because they’re the puzzle’s hooks. Theme writing is the innate, creative act that forms a great puzzle; a strong one is the difference between a software-leaning amateur and a hardcore cruciverbalist who likes to black out squares with a soft lead pencil. Even if you have a bunch of clever definitions and a well-filled grid, Berry believes a well-built theme makes a stronger product. “Crosswords are a bunch of mini-epiphanies,” he says, and solving the theme is the big one.

For example, Berry once constructed a variety puzzle titled “Noah’s Ark.” Solvers had to answer the themed clues and then add or take out two extra letters to fill the entry. The clue would lead the solver to the word sturdy, and he or she would then add two "A"s to make Saturday.

Themes not only set a puzzle’s tone but also determine its shape; a puzzle’s longer entries are usually the same size lengthwise and are placed symmetrically in a puzzle. From there a constructor fills in the rest, or as Berry calls it, “backs into the grid.” There is a serious structure to this. All crosswords must have 180-degree rotational symmetry, which means that if you turn a blank crossword upside down, the pattern of black squares appears the same. Themed entries must conform to the symmetry as well: if there’s an eight-letter entry on the second line in the top right corner, there must be an eight-letter entry on the second-to-last line in the bottom left.

During the clueing process, when he’s racking his database for words to fill the remaining white space, Berry runs into a frustrating part of puzzle construction: avoiding crosswordese, those infrequently used words, such as Ara (a constellation), that haunt the outer edges of puzzle grids. After packing in longer words with catchy definitions he’ll eventually get squeezed into a corner, in need of a three-letter word that starts with E and ends with L. At this point a database query is disappointing. “I hate to think about how many times I’ve clued eel,” he says.

Yet to his fans, Berry is a god at constructing clean, seamless puzzles. Crossword blogger, author and consistent top-10 tournament finisher Amy Reynaldo says that while other constructors fall back on boring clunkers (amuser) or unoriginal space fillers (oleo), Berry shines by constructing smooth, obscurity-free puzzles.

“In a Berry puzzle, odds are that all the words will be more familiar,” Reynaldo says in an email. “So if you’re stuck on a tough clue, don’t assume the answer is something you’ve never heard of. A regular word will eventually emerge from the haze.”

Berry says it’s important to use words that everyone knows; it’s their clues he prefers to make a little tricky or oblique. But “not every clue can be a gem.” Some have to be serviceable. And the ability to recognize which entries deserve the most creativity is what makes Berry a puzzle god. If he clues eel occasionally, it’s in service to something much more whimsical and elegant, say elevator music. “Songs that might make you get out on a floor,” Berry writes. The difference is simple yet memorable.

By making the clues difficult and not the words themselves, Berry keeps the puzzle fun instead of frustrating. “You want to bedevil people as much as possible, but you want them to win in the end,” he says. “If someone spends an hour on a clue, you want him or her to be satisfied.”

Berry’s puzzles, however, are anything but breezy, uncomplicated time-killers. The 2009 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament used a Berry creation in the final round. He’s also considered a late-week specialist at the New York Times, which reserves its most challenging puzzles for Fridays and Saturdays.

Berry’s latest book, Puzzle Masterpieces: Elegant Challenges for Crossword Lovers, is a collection of variety word puzzles that take fanciful forms; they may wind across a page, use triangles instead of squares, or take serpentine shapes. He feels his craft shines in these puzzles; after all, his interest in wordplay began with variety puzzles, not crosswords. “Knowing the answer isn’t always enough,” Berry says. Once you’ve solved the clue, there’s the added difficulty of figuring out how the answer fits into the puzzle’s shape. Variety puzzles also require some instruction for the solver, but they’re free of what Berry considers a crossword’s weakness: crosswordese and short words like eel. Variety puzzles aren’t constrained by grid dimensions either; he can fill them entirely with five-letter words if he feels like it. While he considers them more interesting to solve, variety puzzles just aren’t as salable as crosswords, which is why he constructs traditional grids to help make puzzle writing a viable career.

The Bottom Line

In over 10 years as a self-employed puzzle constructor, Berry has published around 120 New York Times puzzles, two compilations of his work and a Crossword Puzzles for Dummies book that’s considered the manual for becoming a constructor. He also edits the crossword for the Chronicle of Higher Education and constructs a regular puzzle for Yahoo.

In terms of book and daily puzzle writing, Berry’s output places him in a small demographic: according to him, he’s one of roughly 10 full-time puzzle constructors in the country. So, while there might be two accountants, a few schoolteachers and a bunch of waiters at your next Oscar party, Berry is probably the only guy who writes Sit and Solve crossword puzzle books for commuters.

Even though there’s very little professional, full-time competition, Berry still hustles due to a shrinking number of venues for his work and a growing number of amateurs vying for the attention of the few major players: the L.A. Times, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

Daily papers and other one-offs only pay when the puzzles appear in print, and because these spec gigs can sit on puzzles for an extended period, Berry relies on regular gigs like Yahoo and the Chronicle to meet the bottom line.

The top-tier venue, the New York Times, pays $1,000 for a weekend puzzle and $200 for a daily; the Wall Street Journal pays $350 for a weekend; and the L.A. Times recently raised its daily contributor pay to $85 a puzzle.

Crossword as Conversation

Puzzlers are a tight-knit community, historically gathering at annual conferences such as the National Puzzlers’ League, and the personalities are known by their first names. But just as newspapers’ websites opened up reporters to the megabyte-quick reactions of their audiences through anonymous comments, a constructor’s work is now debated daily in online forums and blogs. Luckily, Berry appreciates that sort of give-and-take.

A solver once objected to Berry’s use of bedsore in a puzzle, an entry that he clued as “Possible result of pathological lying?” The solver said that if Berry had truly experienced a bedsore he would not have used the word. Some constructors and editors discourage the use of words that suggest disease or death, and because he hadn’t suffered from bedsores and couldn’t speak to the experience of the wound, Berry paid attention to the criticism, eventually deciding not to use bedsore again. Though he likes to err on the side of caution, Berry says that “some people are offended way too easily, so I’m not always going to back off.”

That’s a good thing, because what’s taboo in cruciverbalist circles is small-talk gold in others.

Andre Gallant