Listen With Others

The idea for Motion came about entirely thanks to the setter Pieman. I was solving his E-graded puzzle ‘Is in the Magpie, and found at a reasonably early stage that an entry going across the top of the grid was DIVISION BELL. This, coupled with the fact that the title was a homophone for AYES led me to think that the theme was a vote in the House of Commons.

After about ten hours further struggle, I realised that I was wrong (I won’t reveal the theme here, in case anybody who hasn’t previously solved Pieman’s extraordinarily difficult puzzle fancies a go at it), but I was left quite fancying the idea of a puzzle using my incorrect guess as a theme.

The next thing that struck me was the phrase ‘AYES TO THE RIGHT, NOES TO THE LEFT’. This had several possibilities, both in terms of clueing and entries into the grid. I recognised that the phrase had come about as MPs filed into either the left hand side of the division lobby or the right hand side of the division lobby to vote, so perhaps I could have DIVISION LOBBY down the centre of the grid, with AYEs on its right hand side, and NOes on its left hand side. DIVISION LOBBY conveniently had 13 letters, so this meant that the grid would be either 12×13 or 13×13. DIVISION LOBBY, rather than being revealed by the rest of the fill, would be an unclued entry so that solvers would have to ‘enter the DIVISION LOBBY’ at the relevant down entry. All good stuff so far.

So, AYEs to the right of the division lobby, NOes to the left, and what else? Well, a result would be nice. So how about either THE AYES HAVE IT or THE NOES HAVE IT? Preferably the AYEs, as this seems more positive, and might leave solvers in a more cheery mood. It would seem sensible to have solvers enter this going across the grid, as both THE AYES HAVE IT and THE NOES HAVE IT also had 13 letters. This led to the first problem. Ideally, this would intersect with the DIVISION LOBBY in the centre of the grid, but this wouldn’t work. The middle letter of both THE AYES HAVE IT and THE NOES HAVE IT was S, so it would have to intersect with the S of DIVISION LOBBY. So, unless I had other 13 letter answers correctly positioned, the grid would be asymmetrical. Would this be a problem? I wasn’t sure. So, it was time for my first time out from thinking about the puzzle, and I took a break of a few days at that point so that things could percolate in my subconscious for a bit.

After what turned out to be a break of a couple of weeks, I came back to the puzzle. I knew that it might upset solvers, but if an assymetrical grid was the only way forward, I didn’t see that being a problem. Lack of symmetry might be ideal, but I think it’s okay to sacrifice it if there is no other way to set the puzzle – as long as the rest of the puzzle is nice and tidy, which hopefully this would be. So, THE NOES HAVE IT would have to intersect with the S of DIVISION LOBBY, and I would just have to make it as symmetrical as I could.

In the intervening period, I’d also thought of a thematic clueing gimmick, such that a letter in one word in a clue had moved to the left or right of the word in which it was situated, and had to be moved back. Of course I couldn’t use ‘left or right’ in the preamble, so ‘beginning or end’ would have to suffice. My initial thought for locating AYEs and NOes in the grid had been just to have instances of them that solvers would have to highlight, but I then thought that it might be a nice thematic touch – and add slightly to the difficulty – by having words containing AYEs and NOes as entries, with the AYE and the NO moved to the left or right of the word on entry. The only challenge then would be to fit as many of these in as possible, and to ensure that the numbers were the same on each side.
The quest for a fill began, starting with an (almost) symmetrical grid in which the two key phrases were appropriately positioned. After a few days playing with Sympathy, I had come up with the following:

I was happy with this, and decided to start writing clues. The clueing device that I had selected made this a pretty serious challenge. Having started to write clues at the start of July 2007, it wasn’t until September that these were finished. I was particularly pleased with the definition of DONNOT as a ‘fine gentleman’ at 12A, although I recognized that this might be difficult for solvers to resolve. A couple of the shifted letter words seemed a bit obvious when reading the clues, but I decided to leave ARMY shifted to become YARM at 11A, simply because we live about 10 miles from Yarm. The original clue for DAMN at 31D also included a tribute to the setter who unknowingly provided the error for the puzzle:

Edification at first for pie man? ____! (4)

Unfortunately the use of ‘pie’ as an angram indicator was to fall foul of the editors, so this never saw the light of day.
The precise wording of the preamble came last. I decided against using the definite article in the sentence ‘On entering 5 down….’ as ‘On entering the 5 down’ would ruin the misdirection that I was aiming for. Also, despite what some of the feedback for the puzzle would later suggest, there was no intricate or deep rationale behind the resolution of the motion. ‘The phrase at 18 across resolves the issue, as well as describing the final outcome’ did exactly what it said on the tin, or so I thought. Without this phrase in the grid, the motion (ie the vote) is tied at 5 AYEs to 5 NOes. Entry of 18 across, THE NOES HAVE IT, provided the 6th NO to win the vote, and announced the result of the Motion.

The last stage before sending the puzzle off to John Grimshaw was to have it test solved. In contrast to many of the comments received after publication, my two test solvers, both Silver Salver winners, found the puzzle very tough indeed. I’m very grateful to their time spent solving it, which is as ever much appreciated. There were some clue rewrites to come out of this, as well as the discovery of one faulty ‘motion’ in a clue, that had somehow slipped through the net, and then it was off to the editors.

When I heard back, it was to find that the puzzle in its current form wasn’t quite acceptable, because of the two entries at 23A and 25A that were four letters long but with 2 unches. Fortunately these had been added reasonably late in the fill, so as to help the unching of crossing entries, so it was simply a case of removing bars from the above grid to reveal BRIE and EVER, renumbering the grid and clues, and then writing two more clues.

There were also five or six other clues to rewrite, four of which were ‘motion’ clues, and it took our Scottish holiday over Easter 2008 to sort these out.

The puzzle returned to the editors shortly afterwards, and that was that. When it came to publication, all I hoped that it would be without the controversy of my first two Listeners, Hunt and The Cause of Much Pain, and I’m very happy that this was largely the case.