For those that love Star Wars and Crossword Puzzles there is a new release coming in November that will be of interest, Star Wars: Crossword Puzzles. Recently, we had the honor to interview James Floyd the author of Star Wars Crossword Puzzles.
FT: Thanks James for taking time for this interview. What interested you most about working on Star Wars Crossword Puzzles in comparison to working on other projects?
JF: As you know, I love Star Wars and writing about Star Wars. I also love creating puzzles of all kinds. I’ve been writing puzzles and organizing games for years, including the Bounty Hunt puzzle race at Star Wars Celebration with a friend since Celebration IV. I also developed and ran the San Diego Rocket Race, a day-long sci-fi themed puzzle hunt across the San Diego area.
It has been a dream of mine to author a book, especially a Star Wars book. When this opportunity came around to write crossword puzzles for Star Wars in an officially licensed book, I immediately jumped on it. For me, there’s writing articles, and then there’s having a book on a bookstore or library shelf with your name on it.
FT: What inspired you to author this?
JF: As a kid, I loved activity books with puzzles and games, and my favorites were the Darth Vader and the Yoda activity books by James Razzi. They were full of mazes, rebuses, word games, riddles, and crossword puzzles. So to have my life come full circle – to combine my love of Star Wars with my love of puzzles: absolutely a dream come true.
FT: What is your favorite entry or section within this book and why?
JF: There’s a few puzzles I’m especially proud of. One of them is the Hoth-themed puzzle, which is in the shape of an AT-AT. (Every crossword puzzle is in the shape of a person, place, or thing connected to the theme of that puzzle.) I put in a few quotes in the puzzle, that align perfectly with the shape of the walker’s legs. And it was mostly coincidental that they fit so well. There are some other puzzles that have subtle jokes hidden either in the clues, or the placement of the answers. The book also contains a few word puzzles that aren’t crosswords, and giving the audience a chance to expand their puzzle-solving horizon is always fun.
FT: What approach did you take when researching the content for this book?
JF: Every clue in the book somehow connects to Star Wars, and usually to the particular theme of that individual puzzle. Let’s take a puzzle based on a film, Revenge of the Sith, for example. I would write a huge list of keywords that relate, including character, vessel, and place names, just out of my head. Then I’d write down a handful of memorable quotes that I might want to fit in the puzzle in whole or in part. Next, I’d find an image whose outline might make for a good shape for the puzzle. In this case, General Grievous. I would trace the main features onto my special graph paper, so I could use the basic outline but also leave room for the eyes and mouth grill.
Then, I would start placing some of the longer keywords or quotes onto the grid. Next, I would start connecting them with other words, crossword style, and fill in the shape of the puzzle. Sometimes I could use my keywords. Other times, I would resort to non-Star Wars words that I could put into a Star Wars context; maybe there was a quote that had the word in it, or writing a word definition that uses a situation in Star Wars as an example.
Each puzzle was entirely crafted by hand in this manner and often I had to erase sections to backtrack to make things connect as much as possible. The denser the puzzle, the more clues there would be and the easier to solve based on letters already filled in – but the more clues there would be, and I’m limited to only one page for clues. Sometimes I would need tiny words, like prepositions, and finding those in quotes would be pretty easy. I could just use the Find function on web pages containing the scripts. For some puzzles, the answers would all be keywords from the list, while in larger puzzles, keywords and quotes would provide less than half of the words in the puzzle. After laying out the puzzle, I would write out the answer key word list with the correct across and down numbers. Then I could write clues to would hopefully lead to the answer. Some of these clues are straightforward, others might involve filling in a blank or clever wordplay. Alliteration is always awesome. I’d usually try to keep the clues as short as possible – after all, the entire set of clues for a puzzle has to fit on one page, but still the book ended up around 30,000 words. Then of course testing. I had a small team of friends at different Star Wars lore knowledge levels to see how solvable the puzzles were. I did want the puzzles to be able to be completed of course, so in some cases changing answers or re-writing clues was necessary. Most puzzles have two or three tougher words, usually a more obscure name or such.
FT: What was the most useful reference material that helped you the most in building the puzzles?
JF: My encyclopedic knowledge from years of watching the movies, reading reference guides and knowing the random names of characters from the old Star Wars CCG. Everything in the book is from the current canon, and pretty much only from the movies and television series. I wanted this to be as accessible as possible, but still provide a challenge for the ones who know it all. Online scripts proved very useful for pulling words out of quotes, but I would find the scene in the final movie with sub-titles to verify that the quote hadn’t been changed or cut. When I needed particular spaces to be bridged, and I didn’t have a Star Wars word at hand, I would use a crossword solving site to help me find words that could fit, and then figure out which ones I could connect to Star Wars.
FT: What is your favorite character, section or puzzle to work on and why?
JF: For the best shapes that I used, I liked crafting the Episode I puzzle in the shape of Queen Amidala, with the puzzle forming her hair and crown and body, leaving her face. The Ahsoka Tano puzzle follows her path through her life and the shows she was in. And the final puzzle was a concept I had been wanting to do even before I started on the book, and worked better than I had conceptualized. I won’t tell you what it is, but it’ll test your noodle.
FT: Did you learn anything new by working on this that you did not know when you first started working on this?
JF: Yeah, I definitely became a better crossword puzzle writer as I went along – both my skills in writing the puzzles and in streamlining the overall creation process. My first puzzle was not even written on graph paper because I didn’t have any yet.
FT: Is there anything else you would like to share about yourself or your writing process?
JF: Writing crosswords is fun. It’s a challenge to myself to see how much I can include within a particular shape, or find ways to throw in an extra twist, like the archway clues in the Mandalorian and Grogu puzzle. Writing the clues gives me a chance to be clever with words. With all the puzzle writing I’ve done over the years, I know the value of playtesting. Finding the right balance between too easy and too hard is a challenge. I want it to be fun for all levels of Star Wars fans, and ones familiar with different parts of the Star Wars saga.
FT: Where can fans find you?
JF: I’m on Twitter/X and Instagram at @jamesjawa
You can preorder Star Wars Crossword Puzzles from the following retailers:
Amazon |Â Barnes and Noble |Â Target
- Audible Audiobook
- Lucasfilm Press (Author) - Kevin Kemp (Narrator)
- English (Publication Language)
- 09/19/2024 (Publication Date) - Audible Originals (Publisher)