How To Avoid Running Out Of Question Ideas
Posted: Fri Aug 26, 2016 3:33 am
I've written a lot of questions in my day, and one of the most frustrating things about the question-writing process is stalling out while I try to think of question ideas. Even though this is a game where lots of topics come up in questions over and over, it paradoxically can become very difficult to come up with compelling answers ideas for new questions just when the time comes for your mind to actually select them. I've seen a lot of experienced writers run into this "writers' block"-esque part of the process, which often hampers timeliness, so it seems worthwhile to share some of my thoughts on what I do to overcome it or work around it.
> Keep a list of academic things you find interesting or amusing, which you'd like to use in questions someday. It's easier to write questions when you're writing about a phenomenon or work that genuinely interests you or that you've been waiting to "break into the 'canon'". (With age, some writers find that interesting things come more readily at the clue level, which lets you sort of "spin" a whole question around a new clue, figuring out the best way to make answer lines reasonable and slot it in appropriately.) But you're not going to have, in readily accessible working memory, all of the things you have ever thought were cool, without some kind of cued recall bringing some of them back up into active consciousness. And you could easily forget something that you spot in a magazine or a journal article somewhere unless you bookmark it in some manner.
I do this by keeping a note on my [password-protected] phone and an Excel sheet sorted by category on my laptop; at its largest extent the Excel sheet has had about 1,000 ideas on it. Scrolling through it again, you may think that some ideas you had are super-dumb, and as the list grows, motivation to write on any of it to clear it out again may drop. But you know you have it in a pinch if some tournament has a hole to fill. (It's obviously important not to share this file with anyone else, or to broadcast in too much detail all the stuff you look at to inspire question ideas. One thing that's sort of sad about quizbowl is that, because you can't spoil things you haven't yet written on, active players really have to be careful what they put on public sites such as Goodreads.)
> Focus in on writing stuff that is deliberately unlike anything else in the tournament you're working on. The more specific you get, the easier it is to come up with question ideas. The human mind gets overwhelmed easily by large numbers and big projects. When your tournament has 300 needs left, it's easy to think "I NEED TO WRITE TO MANY QUESTIONS AGH" and get nowhere, as you spin your gears with writer's block. It sometimes helps to "drill down" from a big top-level category to subcategories and sub-subcategories that the tournament you're working on hasn't filled up yet, tackling a coherent, small sub-segment of the tournament to completion rather than bouncing around writing haphazardly. It's much easier to follow through if you say "One of the things I can write is a history question," and from there easier still if you say "I could write an American history question," and easier yet if you get to the level of "time to write on a Supreme Court case" or "something Civil War" or "something 1990-present". Every all-subject tournament is going to have little mini-niches to be filled like that -- if you don't have something Shakespeare, or some Russian history of some era, or something related to electromagnetism, for a few examples, you'll probably want to get one of each of those done in your attempt to hit all the basic areas.
> If you want to generate a ton of ideas in a really short amount of time, you can "strip mine" old books on your shelf / old reference materials for question ideas. By "strip mine", I mean flipping through a book page-by-page, taking note of (and writing down) every topic that jumps out at you as intriguing enough to use as a clue or answer at some future time. If a lot of the material is basic and just not calling out to you, you can focus only on typing in things that you find compelling enough to write on, or which are new to you. If I have (let's say) a high school European history textbook, I'm not going to write down every basic term if I've written lots of questions on them before, but I may spot a weirdly difficult or as-yet-unasked piece of information when flipping pages rapidly, and seize on that. As an added reward, it helps you decide whether those old books actually still "spark joy" or whatever; if you flip through something and find that it's boring and you won't look back at it again, that can be impetus to give it away or sell it.
> If you are an expert writer, try writing on your topic in a manner that is deliberately unlike any other question you've seen before. (Because I have zero interest in fighting about this, I'll just say now: the answer line need not be complicated to focus the clues in on an overlooked aspect of the topic, or keep the clues tightly "thematic"!) You can make it sort of a game with yourself, to challenge yourself to have a wacky focus and keep things accessible and have a simple answer line.
> When you get a workable idea but haven't written the question yet, start brainstorming outward to other potential clues or related bonus parts. The clearest way to do this is to read a lot of text and actually learn what it says for real and what its words mean. But there are lots of ways to save on time and still find connections between ideas which are more authentic than Wikipedia links. Newer-fangled webpages, such as Revolvy and the Open Syllabus Project, take different approaches to generating a lot of ideas that are related to a focus search topic. And of course, the indexes of reference books can be helpful. If none of that works, ask yourself questions like "Who else was alive when this person/work/event happened?" or "Does this spark any ideas outside this category?" which are guaranteed to shift your perspective and provide a new route for thought. Relatively specific reference books, in particular, are good too.
> You can also just free-associate from a basic common word (e.g. 'snow') and see what kinds of question ideas that gets you. If you are writing for a tournament that has Mixed_Pure_Academic bonuses, you can very quickly knock out a ton of needs this way! ("Answer the following about snow, for 10 points each...")
> Accept that motivation will come and go, and that's okay (provided baseline decency at time management). I think this one is difficult for a lot of question writers, in part because the disaster stories over the years of sets not getting done are so numerous, and in part because a lot of question writers are very self-driven people who do this out of love for the game (or out of desire to get good enough to beat the rival team, or what have you). Not every big question-production day is going to be followed up by another big question-production day, and unless it's crunch time, it's going to happen that some time periods feel more fertile with ideas than others. It may just be that you won't come up with anything intriguing to write about today; if so, don't force it, but instead maybe take a break and walk away from the screen for a few minutes. You may well find a good question idea out in the world.
> Keep a list of academic things you find interesting or amusing, which you'd like to use in questions someday. It's easier to write questions when you're writing about a phenomenon or work that genuinely interests you or that you've been waiting to "break into the 'canon'". (With age, some writers find that interesting things come more readily at the clue level, which lets you sort of "spin" a whole question around a new clue, figuring out the best way to make answer lines reasonable and slot it in appropriately.) But you're not going to have, in readily accessible working memory, all of the things you have ever thought were cool, without some kind of cued recall bringing some of them back up into active consciousness. And you could easily forget something that you spot in a magazine or a journal article somewhere unless you bookmark it in some manner.
I do this by keeping a note on my [password-protected] phone and an Excel sheet sorted by category on my laptop; at its largest extent the Excel sheet has had about 1,000 ideas on it. Scrolling through it again, you may think that some ideas you had are super-dumb, and as the list grows, motivation to write on any of it to clear it out again may drop. But you know you have it in a pinch if some tournament has a hole to fill. (It's obviously important not to share this file with anyone else, or to broadcast in too much detail all the stuff you look at to inspire question ideas. One thing that's sort of sad about quizbowl is that, because you can't spoil things you haven't yet written on, active players really have to be careful what they put on public sites such as Goodreads.)
> Focus in on writing stuff that is deliberately unlike anything else in the tournament you're working on. The more specific you get, the easier it is to come up with question ideas. The human mind gets overwhelmed easily by large numbers and big projects. When your tournament has 300 needs left, it's easy to think "I NEED TO WRITE TO MANY QUESTIONS AGH" and get nowhere, as you spin your gears with writer's block. It sometimes helps to "drill down" from a big top-level category to subcategories and sub-subcategories that the tournament you're working on hasn't filled up yet, tackling a coherent, small sub-segment of the tournament to completion rather than bouncing around writing haphazardly. It's much easier to follow through if you say "One of the things I can write is a history question," and from there easier still if you say "I could write an American history question," and easier yet if you get to the level of "time to write on a Supreme Court case" or "something Civil War" or "something 1990-present". Every all-subject tournament is going to have little mini-niches to be filled like that -- if you don't have something Shakespeare, or some Russian history of some era, or something related to electromagnetism, for a few examples, you'll probably want to get one of each of those done in your attempt to hit all the basic areas.
> If you want to generate a ton of ideas in a really short amount of time, you can "strip mine" old books on your shelf / old reference materials for question ideas. By "strip mine", I mean flipping through a book page-by-page, taking note of (and writing down) every topic that jumps out at you as intriguing enough to use as a clue or answer at some future time. If a lot of the material is basic and just not calling out to you, you can focus only on typing in things that you find compelling enough to write on, or which are new to you. If I have (let's say) a high school European history textbook, I'm not going to write down every basic term if I've written lots of questions on them before, but I may spot a weirdly difficult or as-yet-unasked piece of information when flipping pages rapidly, and seize on that. As an added reward, it helps you decide whether those old books actually still "spark joy" or whatever; if you flip through something and find that it's boring and you won't look back at it again, that can be impetus to give it away or sell it.
> If you are an expert writer, try writing on your topic in a manner that is deliberately unlike any other question you've seen before. (Because I have zero interest in fighting about this, I'll just say now: the answer line need not be complicated to focus the clues in on an overlooked aspect of the topic, or keep the clues tightly "thematic"!) You can make it sort of a game with yourself, to challenge yourself to have a wacky focus and keep things accessible and have a simple answer line.
> When you get a workable idea but haven't written the question yet, start brainstorming outward to other potential clues or related bonus parts. The clearest way to do this is to read a lot of text and actually learn what it says for real and what its words mean. But there are lots of ways to save on time and still find connections between ideas which are more authentic than Wikipedia links. Newer-fangled webpages, such as Revolvy and the Open Syllabus Project, take different approaches to generating a lot of ideas that are related to a focus search topic. And of course, the indexes of reference books can be helpful. If none of that works, ask yourself questions like "Who else was alive when this person/work/event happened?" or "Does this spark any ideas outside this category?" which are guaranteed to shift your perspective and provide a new route for thought. Relatively specific reference books, in particular, are good too.
> You can also just free-associate from a basic common word (e.g. 'snow') and see what kinds of question ideas that gets you. If you are writing for a tournament that has Mixed_Pure_Academic bonuses, you can very quickly knock out a ton of needs this way! ("Answer the following about snow, for 10 points each...")
> Accept that motivation will come and go, and that's okay (provided baseline decency at time management). I think this one is difficult for a lot of question writers, in part because the disaster stories over the years of sets not getting done are so numerous, and in part because a lot of question writers are very self-driven people who do this out of love for the game (or out of desire to get good enough to beat the rival team, or what have you). Not every big question-production day is going to be followed up by another big question-production day, and unless it's crunch time, it's going to happen that some time periods feel more fertile with ideas than others. It may just be that you won't come up with anything intriguing to write about today; if so, don't force it, but instead maybe take a break and walk away from the screen for a few minutes. You may well find a good question idea out in the world.