NYT Picks Cross Student’s Crossword

Three clues about Tuesday’s New York Times crossword puzzle: Its writer has four letters in his first name. He lives in New Haven. And he has two years left of high school.

The writer is Wilbur Cross rising junior Jose Chardiet.

Some degree-studded adults try all their lives to have a puzzle of their own devising accepted by the Times. Jose becomes the fifth-youngest puzzle ​“constructor” ever to achieve that august status.

He did it on his first try.

The 16-year-old sent in two puzzles in April. Last last month he received an email from the puzzle editor Will Shortz that his submission is scheduled to be published on Tuesday.

Shortz told the Independent that he receives 75 – 100 crossword submissions weekly, ​“so the competition for publication is fierce.”

“It’s sort of a coup for anyone to have a crossword accepted for the the Times, but especially so for a 16-year-old,” Shortz wrote in an email. ​“For Jose to have the skill and the knowledge to do this is pretty amazing.

“Crosswords have a reputation of being mainly for older people, but that’s clearly no longer the case, if it ever was.”

Shortz has published 21 teenagers’ crosswords since he started editing the puzzle in 1993, he said. Jose is the fourth youngest.

Shortz and his staff said they were impressed that Jose’s puzzle had five theme entries plus a ​“kicker.” For those of you (like your reporter) who are not puzzle aficionados, the kicker is the clue or answer that reveals the theme. Once you have discovered the theme, you can run more answers, you hope.

Jose began doing puzzles when he was 14. He a little bored on a college-visiting trip for his sister Tess (pictured). He grabbed some puzzle magazines, eventually had his parents subscribe to the Times, and the rest is, as they say, puzzle history.

In addition to having no in-house obsessive puzzle-doing models, Jose is not a word-obsessed bibliophile. His dad George said that Jose’s sisters Tess and Margy read more than he does.

In addition to Cross, Jose attends Educational Center for the Arts, where he studies visual arts, print-making being his current favorite. He also loves movies by P.T. Anderson, Jim Jarmusch, Ridley Scott, and Martin Scorsese, whom his dad introduced him to.

Pursuing his movie interests, Jose will be working at Best Video starting in the fall.

“I’m more into the art of making puzzles,” he said during an interview at home in Westville.

In the same way that he would wonder how movies were put together scene by scene, Jose said, he was drawn into constructing puzzles by the elegance of the array of black squares. He was intrigued by the positioning of the requisite theme answers that anchor the construction like a foundationof a house; and ​“how many new and different ideas stem from a 15 by 15 grid.”

We can’t reveal the theme of his Tuesday puzzle, but the Times’ guidelines call for themes that are fresh, a structure that is symmetrical (those black boxes), and moderation in use of brand names.

“I was half-breaking the rule of the New York Times, which is in general he [Shortz] wouldn’t want to use a theme bearing a brand. But he liked it so much, he let it [be published],” Jose said.

Jose works out his puzzles on grid paper. The computer, however, is always nearby, where sites like xwordinfo and crosswordcompiler guide him as to how often words and clues have been used before. He likes to stay contemporary and fresh.

“Once I come up with a theme I like, the biggest challenge is getting the cross-answers to work together. You don’t want some Hungarian river to cross with an Irish president, because then you’re setting someone up in a corner they can’t solve,” he said.

In the effort to mix the hard and the easy, cluing is his least favorite part of the work, Jose said. ​“It’s tedious and it’s hard to come up with something new.”

Four or perhaps five of the answers in Tuesday’s puzzle are words that he has not seen before in puzzles. Those Jose is particularly proud of devising.

“Mathematicians or scientists will use words in their field,” Jose said. Then he showed a reporter a puzzle created by a fellow teen constructor, Caleb Madison, also published in the Times. ​“A senior in high school will use ​‘senioritis,’ he said.

Jose declined to reveal clues about Tuesday’s puzzle. In a different puzzle he’s still working on, the theme has the word ​“info” embedded in many answers, such as ​“brainfood.”

In another puzzle on the Chardiet drawing board, or grid, the theme is synonyms for throwing stuff out. Some of the answers in that one include: ​“toss and turn,” ​“can opener,” and a favorite, ​“Chuck Norris.”

How does Jose explain the acceptance of his Times crossword on his first try?

The one-word answer is patience.

The puzzle took two to three months to construct, an hour’s worth of work each day after school and homework.

“I was always hesitant to send something in. Afraid it’d be rejected. So I set it aside. Then I came back [to work on the puzzle]. Got rid of stuff I didn’t like. Not wanting that rejection notice.”

On Saturday Jose and his dad George (pictured) were working on the Sunday puzzle.

Jose leads the way in his family doing the Monday puzzle in eight minutes; the Tuesday and Wednesday in 20; Thursday’s in an hour. Fridays and Saturdays he says he rarely finishes ​“without cheating.”

George Chardiet said he was the guinea pig for his son’s NYT-accepted puzzle. ​“It took me a week on and off to solve his puzzle, and with help from him,” he said, with evident pride.

Here’s some help on the Sunday puzzle, if you haven’t finished it yet: For 38 across the clue is ​“Not e’en once” The answer is ​“neer.”

He solves the puzzle as a constructor, Jose said, knowing that if a contraction is in the clue, consistency will call for a contraction in the answer

Jose will receive $200 for his Times puzzle. He plans to spend the cash not on puzzle books but on his fund for college, which he has not yet thought about.

On second thought, maybe he’ll spend the money on movie DVDs.