[bright music]
- Angela Fitzgerald: Twice each week,
The Monroe Times hits the news racks, the post office,
and then mailboxes like the Mathiasons'.
As a kid, Ryan Mathiason found something in the paper
that fired his own newspaper ambition:
to one day be published
in no less than The New York Times.
- Ryan Mathiason: I think that was kind of, like,
a big point for me
was getting published in The New York Times as a teenager.
It's something that 70-some people have done
in their 80 years of doing a daily crossword puzzle.
- Angela: It was the newspaper's crossword puzzle
that inspired young Ryan,
something introduced to him by his grandmother.
- Ryan: My grandma, she would be solving, like,
The Monroe Times crossword every once in a while,
and she would involve me by saying,
"Oh, I think you would know this answer."
Cincinnati baseball team, and I would say "Reds,"
'cause I would know that.
So, I thought, "Oh, this is an interesting thing.
I'm gonna try to start solving them."
And you start solving them
and you think, "Hmm, can I try to make this?"
- Angela: Ryan was determined to solve
how the puzzles are made.
As he entered the world of the crossword constructor,
he learned it was key to start with a theme.
- So, you're trying to come up with some clever thing
that is tying these answers together.
- Angela: The puzzle Ryan is working on now
has the theme "Cold Opens,"
with words beginning with synonyms for cold.
- Ryan: Cool beans, bittersweet, frozen asset,
and then cold opens.
Kind of getting colder as we go down.
So, now that we have the theme in place,
we have to put in the blocks.
- Angela: After the blocks comes what is called the fill.
The words not on theme, some suggested by the computer.
- Ryan: I'm just trying to find lively fill to put in there.
So, maybe we'll put entrée and then desert.
It kind of looks like entrée and dessert, which is fun,
but it's actually entrée and desert.
- Angela: Words in place, it's time for cluing.
And Ryan is on his own with no computer assist.
- Ryan: Then we have PBS in the middle,
so we could do Wisconsin Life channel,
something like that.
- Angela: Since becoming a constructor,
Ryan gets crossword inspiration everywhere he goes.
- Ryan: I was sitting in Spanish class
and I heard my teacher say "language barrier,"
and I thought, "That should be a crossword puzzle."
The language barrier could literally be
the black squares in the puzzle.
They're separating words where they can also help my theme.
So, it would be C-SPAN, like the TV channel,
and then Ishmael.
Spanish would be in the circled letters.
Another example would be having Greek, the end of ogre,
and then the EK would start something like eke out,
like eke out a living.
- Angela: Ryan is not eking out a living through puzzles,
but he is getting paid.
The Wall Street Journal bought his language barrier puzzle,
one of several Ryan has published
while still a teenager.
- So, my first-ever published crossword was when I was 17
in Universal, which was a syndicate.
And my next published puzzle, I had turned 18,
was in the USA Today.
- Angela: Time was running out
on Ryan's New York Times teenage dream,
but he never gave up.
- Ryan: It was my 40th submission to The New York Times
is when I first got an acceptance letter.
When I finally saw that email, I was like, "I've done it."
- Angela: At 19, Ryan Mathiason reached the pinnacle
of puzzle publishing, from The Monroe Times inspiration
to The New York Times publication.
- Ryan: You have, I don't know, how many hundreds of thousands
or millions of people solving a puzzle that you created.
So, I think it's kind of cool to know
that some of their excitement for the day
is coming from something I made.
- Angela: Sharing with his fellow crossword lovers
is the best part.
- Ryan: There is a world out there who is doing my puzzle.