The clue with two answers

Text C: an original fiction extract.

Evan had spent three evenings making his first crossword for the student magazine. The editor, May, asked for a small square which could be finished during lunch. Evan produced a grid of eleven rows, blacked out the unused spaces and wrote the clues in a separate column. He was particularly pleased with one: a clever description of something that could be both part of a tree and a place to sit. The answer was branch. He imagined readers recognising the trick and admiring how little space it needed.

May did not begin with his favourite clue. She filled the top corner, left three gaps and asked him whether every answer was meant to be in the school's everyday vocabulary. Evan pointed to a dictionary on the shelf. All the words were there. May agreed, then asked whether a dictionary was normally part of lunch. He said difficult words made a crossword challenging. She said they could also make it a guessing exercise for somebody who had understood the clue correctly.

They gave copies to two pupils waiting for a club meeting. One solved the tree clue immediately. The other wrote settee, which fitted the same number of squares and the idea of a seat, although not the tree part. Evan explained why branch was better. The pupil accepted this and asked whether he could finish the other clues without having to find Evan each time. Evan's explanation suddenly sounded like an extra piece of the puzzle which only some readers would receive.

The larger difficulty appeared in the lower corner. A clue asked for a word meaning an agreement, with four letters. Evan expected deal. One tester wrote pact. Both answers were valid, but pact made the crossing word impossible. May asked whether Evan wanted to add more specific information. He resisted because the clue looked wonderfully spare. Then he saw that he had confused his own knowledge of the answer with the evidence available to somebody solving it.

He spent the next lunch revising instead of designing a decorative title. He replaced two rare crossing words and made the agreement clue more precise. One test reader still left it unfinished. She said she had enjoyed the top half, then run out of time before her meeting. Evan nearly gave her the missing answers. Instead he asked which clue she had found most satisfying. It was not the tree one. She liked a plain clue whose answer connected two sections of the grid.

May put the revised puzzle in the magazine, with the solution on the last page. Evan checked the printed squares and found that his name occupied less space than the answer key. At lunch, a friend folded the magazine open and began writing. Evan stood nearby for a minute, then went to buy his own food. The pencil kept moving without him.

You are Evan. Write your journal entry on the day the crossword appears in the magazine.

In your response:

• explain the problems revealed by testing your first version
• reflect on why some of the feedback was difficult to accept
• consider what you now want readers to experience and how you will design another puzzle

Base your response on Text C, developing its ideas in your own words. Write about 250 to 300 words. Up to 10 marks are available for reading and up to 10 marks for writing.