The Quizbowl Resource Center

Over the course of my half-year on the forums, the general consensus is that writing questions is the best way to study questions. It's also generally agreed that it's the hardest way to study questions, but I suppose that's the tradeoff. I've recently become interested in possibly writing questions, but I have no idea where to start. I feel like just writing questions to write them would be a waste of time (and if it's not, please tell me that), but I currently have no direction as to what to write or for whom to write. In a perfect world, I'd have my team write a housewrite and hist a tournament or something, but I'm 101% sure I'm the only person interested in writing. Does anybody have any thoughts or suggestions?

Apply to write for one of the several companies that exist. NAQT's cycle won't come open for another few months, but they would be an excellent opportunity for you. My company, SAGES, has a lot going on but unforunately due to the vagaries of the elementary/MS world, most of the sets aren't in any kind of standard national format that would be good writing practice for you. There's also NHBB and SCOP that you can inquire about.

Gonna chime in that you can also just write questions to stow away for personal or later use. I think some of the more charitable people here have written packets (or even sets) that they read in Discord later, where they tend to always find at least one person happy to play them.

You can also just stockpile them without showing them to anyone just in case you do want to convert them into a housewrite or vendor question in the future.

This is all aside from just writing questions for a vendor outright, of course.

alexdz wrote:Apply to write for one of the several companies that exist. NAQT's cycle won't come open for another few months, but they would be an excellent opportunity for you.

For the record, we require applicants to be at least 18 years old and to have graduated from high school. (Full details about applying to become an NAQT writer are here.)

I run a Provisional Writer training program every other summer to train new writers for NHBB; that'll run next in summer 2019, and you're more than welcome to apply for that when it draws closer. Other than that, I unfortunately don't have a good opportunity to train novice writers. SCOP's probably in a better position for training new writers; I'll make sure Kristin sees this.

tksaleija wrote:I feel like just writing questions to write them would be a waste of time (and if it's not, please tell me that)

It's not; learning clues via research is powerful, and going through the writing process of clue choice and clue ordering is great to better understand the topic. The worst case scenario is "all the questions I'm writing are gathering dust until I can sell them/join a housewrite and put them there/etc.," and in that case, it's just a matter of patience. Definitely, definitely write if the idea interests you.

I'm bumping this because I'm still very interested in writing questions. I'm going to commit to 40-50 questions for a middle school set over the summer, but I would love to contribute to a high school set too if possible. I admit that I have no experience writing questions, but I have recently started making just practice study guides for myself in the last few months and I would love to gain experience in actual writing. Please PM me if you know of or have any such opportunities.

Edit: added some more information that may be pertinent.