#Wrap-up: The Making Of Hearken now, and listen close

This is not a solution to the puzzle, but provides notes from its poser. This type of answer has been approved by the community.

CAUTION: This post contains spoilers for the puzzle.

Being familiar with

lipograms,

I thought it would be fun to create a puzzle containing them. I thought I could create a story where each paragraph

left out a certain letter,

and those letters combined to provide the solution.

But then I realized that, especially with less-common letters, it wouldn't always be obvious

which letter was being excluded.

This led me to the realization that every paragraph would have to

contain every letter of the alphabet, except the one being excluded.

Being an aficionado of rhyme and poetry, I decided to create the puzzle in verse.

I initially thought that the puzzle might be too difficult without any hints, so I decided to build a hint into the puzzle by making the

first letter of every line combine to provide the hint.

Partway through, I realized that would be too difficult, so instead I just made it

all the uppercase letters,

which proved to be a little more manageable.

I came up with a phrase that I thought would be a good solution to the puzzle, and then got to work.

I found some online resources, including:

A rhyming dictionary

(this was useful in helping to find rhymes to complete each stanza)

A thesaurus

(this was useful when I needed a word, but it contained the "forbidden" letter; I used a synonym without that letter instead)

Lists of words containing Q, X, Z, and J (these were helpful in finding not-too-obscure words that would "use up" these letters so that I could get every letter into the stanza)(words like "just, enjoy, equal, quiet, quite, quick, fix, text, excel, lazy, gaze, puzzle)

I set up a spreadsheet in Excel that would

count the number of each letter in a paragraph, and tell me which letters did not yet appear.

Then I started composing the rhymes. I was somewhat constrained by the requirement to

have the uppercase letters spell out the hint,

but I could be a little flexible in that regard by abusing punctuation -- especially semi-colons.

I didn't have a clear idea of what the poem was going to contain when I began -- I just kind of "winged it." I noticed after about 4 stanzas that the subject matter was becoming a little redundant, so I started trying to change it up a little, by leaving some oblique hints.

When beginning each new stanza, I tried to

get a number of words containing less-common letters like J, Q, V, X, and Z

into the first couple of lines, so that I wasn't struggling to

cram too many letters in at the end.

When I got to the second stanza, I realized I had a challenge ahead of me, because I needed to

include every letter except U, which means I needed to figure out a way to get Q in there without an accompanying U. There are a few words that have Q without U, but none is particularly common, and they would stick out like a sore thumb.

I eventually came up with the idea of

referring to the letter itself, in the common phrase, "mind your P's and Q's."

I think it worked out quite well.

It probably took about 4 hours over the course of an evening to construct all 11 stanzas. I revised things several times until I was satisfied with the content, metre, and rhymes.

I learned afterward that I didn't need to build the hint into the puzzle (although I still think it added something to the puzzle). It was originally solved without the hint, which was only discovered after the fact. People on this site are good! (Although in retrospect, it probably wasn't as hard as I thought, either.)