Experiments in style: Cryptic crossword version

A cruciverbalist's delight -- or nightmare!

Nov 26, 2023

One of the things I’ve been trying out is reworking a piece of text into a completely different style. A full exposition and explanation are given here:

Eclecticism: Reflections on literature and life

Experimenting with styles

Introduction A good way of improving your writing skills is to try reworking texts into a completely different style or genre. To some extent this overlaps with parody writing, which I intend to explore in a separate post, but as a quick example, consider this. In Brand X Fiction, a collection of parodies of fiction writers…

3 years ago · 2 likes · 6 comments · Terry Freedman

In today’s experiment I’d like to tell the story in the style of a cryptic crossword. Before you panic, I’ve used a particular type of cryptic crossword, one that is relatively easy in my opinion. First, though, here is the original text on which these experiments or transformations are based:

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The original (template) text

In the middle of the night, I woke up (if you can call being semi-conscious being awake), walked purposefully towards the door to go to the bathroom — and almost knocked myself out.

The reason was that in the twin states of entire darkness and semi-somnambulance I was facing in a different direction from the one I thought I was facing. As a result, instead of walking through the door, I tried to walk through the wall.

The next few days brought nausea and headaches. After much prevarication I went to Accident and Emergency, where I waited petrified among people for whom “social distancing” means not quite touching you, and who wore their masks as a chin-warmer.

An hour and a half later I emerged into the twilight, secure in the knowledge that I had nothing more serious than mild concussion. I failed to do much writing, but I was pleased to have read a further 17% of my book.

Cryptic crossword version

In this version I’ve put the story into a crossword. I’ve written out a version of the story, though not using the original wording. Your job is to try to work out what the missing words are, and fit them into the grid. (The grid is not interactive, so I’m afraid you will need to print it out.)

Ready? Here goes.

A few 24 ago I had a terrible 29. I tend to drink a lot during the day, especially 5, which acts as a 3. Well, on this particular 35 I had to get up to answer 13 21 27 34, but I was so 18 that I lost my 6 17 20 and got out of the 33 side of 19. Boff! Straight into the 18. As you can 23, the next few days I felt a bit 12. I had nausea and 30. In the 25 I went to get myself 2 14 in the local 16. Nobody there was wearing their 1 properly, and hardly anyone was sticking to 13 31 10 7. Eventually a 26 gave me the 32 27 and told me I had 9 15 and that I should 11 4 8. Unfortunately, I didn’t 22 very much, but I did manage to do a fair bit of 28.

Over to you

I’d love to hear your thoughts on today’s version.

For more experiments, please see the index. Paid subscribers also get behind the scenes information about some of these experiments as well as access to the whole of the back catalogue so to speak. In the most recent one there’s a poll (last day today!) asking about readers’ preferences.

If you enjoyed tackling this puzzle, please have a look at

Mitchell Allen

’s puzzle website. There are some real brain-teasers there, many of which have been invented by Mitch himself. Here it is: