How to Make a Crossword Puzzle Grid

Video Transcript

"When starting to write a crossword puzzle, the best thing is to start with the grid. Now for a British style crossword grid, the cryptic grid, I will start with a blank grid, which just has every second square and every second row with a block in it. So this provides the standard beginning for a cryptic crossword grid. And then I will start by entering some blocks into it. So let?s say I want to put a block in this square; now in order to maintain the rotational symmetry that would mean a block down here as well. And if I'm going to do 90 degree symmetry, which I like to do, you need a block here and a block there. Then I would go somewhere else and maybe put a block onto the third row, here. And once again we see we have four blocks entered into the grid. At this point I might decide I don't want to maintain the 90 degree symmetry, so I'll switch to using 180 degree. And for example, put a block into this square here, and the corresponding block would be here. And now we have an almost finished crossword grid."