![]() Shortz is diplomatic in discussing the two puzzle types, somewhat like a father discussing two different children - one academic and a little nerdy, the other flashier and hipper. With a collaborator in Europe, he got them done. Martin's Press asked if he could produce three Sudoku books in 10 days. Somehow he found the time to add the job of best-selling Sudoku author, a role that fell into his lap a year ago. After this workout, it's back to the office for some evening work. His goal is to become one of the best in the country in his age group. He plays about three hours an evening, five to six days a week. ![]() ![]() At the end of the day, Shortz heads to a nearby club to work on his "hobby" - table tennis. Shortz, not FRIDAY," one reader fumed.Īnother fact about Will Shortz: He is extremely focused. Sometimes readers were just irate that a puzzle was too tough for its anointed day: "It's MONDAY, Mr. "You should be hanged by your cojones," wrote another. But one need only hear excerpts from his favorite letters to see how seriously fans take their crosswords. Part of his time is also spent handling reader mail, which has slowed down over the years. Shortz chooses the best of them, rewrites half the clues himself, and puts them through a vetting process. Working out of his home in suburban Westchester, Shortz spends most of his day sorting through the 60-75 puzzles sent each week by "puzzle constructors" hoping to get published. (Lest he sound unbearably nerdy, Shortz doesn't actually look that way - Stewart, who says he'd expected a man he could steal lunch money from, calls him the "Errol Flynn of crossword puzzles.") His wrote his thesis on word puzzles before the year 1860. So he convinced the school to let him pursue an independent major in - quick, what's a 12-letter word for the study of puzzles? - e-n-i-g-m-a-t-o-l-o-g-y. When Shortz, now 53, arrived at Indiana University 30-plus years ago, there was only one thing he wanted to study - after all, he'd sold his first puzzle at age 14. So serious that he invented an academic discipline. ![]() What do we learn from a conversation with Will Shortz? First, that he is very, very serious about puzzles. Which is surely a lot of money in the bank - "you can do the math," is all he'll say - for a man who got into puzzles for love, assuming he'd be poor, but happy. Put another way, he's got 5 million copies in print, and another million rolling off the presses. But Shortz has embraced it, and it's been very good to him: He has 27 Sudoku books on the market, according to his editors, the largest market share of any author. Sudoku involves numbers, not words, and logic, not accumulated knowledge. Yet there's one word that's not discussed in "Wordplay," and it's a six-letter one: Sudoku, the addictive puzzle craze that originated in Japan, has captivated Britain and is now - in Shortz's words - "crushing" crossword puzzles in the United States. And now "Wordplay," which opens nationwide on Friday, is shining a spotlight on a man who's a household name to many (he's also National Public Radio's "Puzzle Master") but would hardly be recognizable on the street, and doesn't even have an assistant to help answer his mail. Mostly though, Shortz gets it right - he writes over 30,000 clues a year - and he's a hero to untold numbers of puzzle addicts, among them a former president (Bill Clinton) and a popular comic (Jon Stewart). "For a week, I thought I was the only person in the country that didn't know the Rupp Arena was in Lexington," Shortz says in an interview, wincing visibly at the memory. The bad clue went out, and the mail flowed in. But an overly hasty Internet search steered him wrong. That's Rupp Arena, in Lexington, Ky., not Louisville. Like when, sometime in the late 90s, he wrote the clue "Louisville landmark." NEW YORK - You'd think the life of the world's premier crossword puzzle editor would be, well, fun and games.īut consider this: Make one little mistake, and a world of hungry word fanatics is waiting to pounce.įor Will Shortz, longtime editor of the New York Times crossword puzzle and now subject of the new documentary "Wordplay," those moments come very rarely, maybe a dozen times a year.īut they burn.
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