So You Want to Write a Housewrite
Posted: Sat Jun 23, 2012 11:05 pm
It’s that time of year again, as we begin formulating rough ideas of our plans for next season: what tournaments to play, what tournaments to host, and most importantly, what sets will be used for these things. Like every year in recent memory, this summer we’ll surely see the announcement of a large number of house-written sets; discussion has already begun in the relevant forums.
At first glance, a plethora of housewrites appears to be a great boon to the quizbowl community -- more sets means more tournaments can be run in each circuit and tournament directors have more options to select what’s right for their area. However, this must be taken with a grain of salt. With an HSAPQ or NAQT set, you know what you’re getting. With the first mirror of any housewrite though, it may not end too well, as we saw in some cases this year. (TD pro-tip: If the writers of a set are untested, keep regularly in contact with them and ask to see samples of their work. Don’t just trust that they’ll do a great job!)
But, the blame for running a bad set can’t fall at the feet of the TD -- it lies squarely with the head editors, and to a lesser degree, the writers, who are ultimately responsible for its ill-guided creation and deceptive marketing.
And so, those of you posting in the collaboration thread and announcing your tournaments, this post is made for you, and the scores who have contemplated being like you. It’s mostly an outpouring of my thoughts, gleaned from my experience head-editing high school sets in the past two years, and the wisdom imparted to me by others, who helped and encouraged me in the making of this post. Ideally it will be a brief guide to housewriting (there are plenty of guides on question-writing itself out there, I’m writing about the other stuff) and a cautionary note for those contemplating writing a set. I don’t pretend to know everything, so if you read this and have any additional thoughts/questions/comments, please post them!
====================================================================
So you want to write a housewrite. You’ve seen the announcements of others on the forums, and now you’ve decided it’s time for you to do so yourself. So what do you do?
If your school typically writes a tournament (so if you go to like Hunter or Maggie Walker or something) ask your elders. Otherwise:
The first, and most important thing to keep in mind is that right now you suck at writing. You might be really good at the game of quizbowl itself, but if you’ve never written before, you are not that great at it. (Fun experiment: write three tossups today, save them in a word document, then look at them months or years from now when you have a lot more writing experience. You will cringe.) Your questions might be OK, and could be polished up by a good editor into something which would play very nicely, but if you’ve never done this before there’s no way you can head-edit a well-written tournament. I’m not insulting you, it’s a fact -- I was the same, as was just about everyone else.
So how do you get good enough to write a full tournament? Like everything else, it can only be accomplished with practice. Start small: write a few of the best tossups you can (and spend time on it!) and read them to experienced people on the quizbowl irc, submit your questions to people who know what they’re doing (like the feedback program), or even venture into packet-submission college tournaments (ACF Fall is a thing that happens -- writing a packet will get you a discount, practice, and I’m sure feedback on the quality of your questions if you ask for it). Work on projects under experienced people. The list goes on and on; the most important thing is simply to have practice writing questions before you attempt to write a full tournament.
Flash-forward a few months: you’ve written some questions, gotten some feedback, and think you’re ready to tackle a tournament. Now’s when you open that word document, and see if your initial questions would have been up to snuff! :) The best thing to do now is to send out some feelers within your team. Are you up for hosting and writing a tournament? Is your coach cool with the idea? Most importantly, will your teammates support you? Much of LIST I was done by a teammate of mine and I by ourselves over spring break; had I known the rest would write so little, I may not have tried to tackle the project. Make sure your friends are on board and understand what will be demanded of them!
A much easier solution may be to collaborate with another school or two, especially if they have more writing experience than you. Perhaps, after a year of working as the second-in-command under someone more experienced on a set, you’ll be more likely to do a good job in the lead position the year after. Or, you mostly know what you’re doing, but no one on your team is any good at science or fine arts, and another school has a good science and fine arts writer. One must be very careful with collaboration though -- I highly recommend in collaborative (and all other housewrites) someone be firmly designated as the in-charge head editor. Two of the less fantastically written tournaments of the past year (RM/TP/Bellarmine and FNT) were both collaborations, and the cause of FNT’s problems were six equal “head editors,” none of which took responsibility for the set as a whole, leading to some gross oversights.
Now you need to figure out the difficulty you’re shooting for. In your case, this is quite simple! It’s your first time writing, so you’re shooting for regular difficulty. It’s much better to wind up easier than harder, if you err slightly, so do your best to restrain yourself, and call out your co-writers whenever you think they’re writing too hard of questions.
So now, you’ve made it through all this. You know what you’re doing, you’ve got a corps of mostly dedicated people who mostly know what they’re doing to back you up, and you’re ready to write. I assume you can figure out distributional stuff on your own (you have a little freedom but don’t be too wacky or stupid with it -- just look at other sets’ distributions as models). You now need to set up spreadsheets and the like to organize your writing progress. When I work, I sort it so the columns are the categories, the rows are the packets, and in the boxes go the answerline, color-coded by how done it is (like white for nothing, red for written, yellow for edited, green for packeted/playtested/powermarked, or something similar). Do whatever works for you, and if someone reading this has a different system, I’d love to hear.
While the number of columns is easy to figure out (21 or 22 questions per packet works quite nicely), the number of rows should be selected with greater caution. Frankly put, some sets do not have enough packets to allow the flexibility needed. If you want to be writing a good set, which will allow other hosts the ability to set up a fair, good schedule, 14 packets is the minimum. A tournament in Missouri this year had rooms and moderators enough to expand beyond 24 teams, but GSAC only had 12 packets -- this led to a smaller field cap and an extraordinarily contrived schedule which ultimately ended up messed up. Had GSAC had 14 packets, they could have just easily done preliminary brackets of 6 then rebracketed to 8 or vice versa, and the tournament would have been a much nicer experience for all. I don’t say this to impugn GSAC specifically, many other tournaments had too few packets, but rather to provide an example of how this does indeed cause problems. Hosts should keep this in mind when deciding what to mirror: if you choose to use a set which asininely only 12 packets, not only are you unable to adapt to changing field sizes, but you encourage the writing institution to continue writing too few packets in future years, harming many tournaments to come.
This leads me to one of my two main points in this post, which I won’t claim to have come up with myself (can’t remember who said it though, sorry!): Writing a quizbowl set is a very easy thing to “barely finish.” It’s really really tempting to look at twelve complete packets and have no desire to start on a thirteenth. It’s really really easy to skim a complete set and send it out rather than spend a day proofreading to catch as much as possible. Realize when you post in that forum, writing a good set will be a lot of work. Writing a great set will be even more. If you don’t want to put in the requisite time to turn out a fantastic product, then head-editing is not the right job for you.
So now you’ve written 14+ packets of good questions, and have edited them to the best of your ability. If this is your first tournament head-editing, play-test all your questions. Read the questions out loud to yourself, or a group of people who know what they’re doing, to catch wording errors. More importantly, find someone experienced and get them to look over the set for you. When I say experienced, I don’t mean a college freshman or two who haven’t head-edited anything but worked for Fall Novice once, I mean EXPERIENCED: someone who has edited multiple high school tournaments and can instantly tell a good question from a bad one. A great place to do this is the quizbowl irc channel -- usually it’s just a bunch of semi-busy college people sitting around who are almost always more than happy to be read a packet and provide feedback if you ask them nicely and politely. In fact, it might even be a good idea to playtest the first packet of completed questions, so that you can nip any problems you have in the bud. No one will write your set for you, but people will gladly spend a little time finding weaknesses in the set.
This leads me to my second major point: The best writer/editors are those who listen to the feedback that they’re given. If the people playtesting know what they’re doing, heed their advice! If they tell you clues are bad, replace them. If they tell you a question is not workable, replace it (or figure out why they think it’s unworkable, suggest a fix, and see what they say). It’s really easy to be lazy and not do this, but remember what I said earlier!
So now you’re (mostly) done. Put the questions in packets, powermark them if you’re using powers and you haven’t done so yet (have one person do this near the end, so it’s uniform -- I recommend doing so right before play-testing), and send it out to the people hosting. If this is occurring the Thursday or Friday before the first running of the set, you’re doing it too late. Shoot to have your set done a week early, and don’t let yourself fall behind -- question quality drops massively if you have less time to work, and you should allot the last few weeks to the proofreading/playtesting, as they take a non-negligible amount of time.
Congrats, if you did all this, you wrote a very good tournament, and you can look forward to hearing nice things in forum posts. Remind people not to discuss until all mirrors are done, and if you get specific feedback, fix the relevant questions.
OK THIS PART IS IMPORTANT SO READ IT
Writing a tournament is hard. If you do it, you are making a commitment to do your utmost to make it a fine set of questions for everyone who plays them. If you fail to do this, you are doing a terrible disservice to yourself, the rest of your team, everyone involved in writing the set, the people who host mirrors, and, very importantly, the pyramidal quizbowl community as a whole. Your questions will leave an impression on every team which plays them; for some, it may be the first exposure they have to the notion of pyramidal quizbowl, and if you screw up, you turn them away from the game for a long time, if not forever. Even experienced teams and their coaches may be soured by a poorly produced set of questions. Do yourself and everyone else a favor and give it your all for the next few months to do a good job.
I understand that many of you want to write questions because you want to improve. From time to time, everyone gets the itch to write quizbowl questions. This does not mean, however, that you are ready to produce a tournament, unless you take in and internalize the sober reality that many sets today are subpar and fail to meet the acceptable standards detailed above. It is far far better to be a seemingly insignificant part of a project than start a project on your own that you won’t do properly. If all you’re in it for is improvement, then just write the questions and read them to friends.
tl;dr summary of this entire post (read the whole thing though!): Remember, ask advice and take it to heart. Do not be lazy or bite off more than you can chew. Doing a bad job is a terrible terrible thing, so do a good job. Don't be ashamed to realize that a housewrite is in fact a lot of work, and not for everyone!
If you have any questions/comments/concerns, please post! Good luck writing!
EDIT (6/24/12): It should be noted (since someone has had extensive private discussion with me on this manner) that in the 14-packet example, GSAC wasn't the only culpable set, as the originally-intended-to-be-mirrored VCU/OSU set also had too few packets, and GSAC was chosen to replace it at the last minute; my point still stands that 14 is the minimum acceptable number.
At first glance, a plethora of housewrites appears to be a great boon to the quizbowl community -- more sets means more tournaments can be run in each circuit and tournament directors have more options to select what’s right for their area. However, this must be taken with a grain of salt. With an HSAPQ or NAQT set, you know what you’re getting. With the first mirror of any housewrite though, it may not end too well, as we saw in some cases this year. (TD pro-tip: If the writers of a set are untested, keep regularly in contact with them and ask to see samples of their work. Don’t just trust that they’ll do a great job!)
But, the blame for running a bad set can’t fall at the feet of the TD -- it lies squarely with the head editors, and to a lesser degree, the writers, who are ultimately responsible for its ill-guided creation and deceptive marketing.
And so, those of you posting in the collaboration thread and announcing your tournaments, this post is made for you, and the scores who have contemplated being like you. It’s mostly an outpouring of my thoughts, gleaned from my experience head-editing high school sets in the past two years, and the wisdom imparted to me by others, who helped and encouraged me in the making of this post. Ideally it will be a brief guide to housewriting (there are plenty of guides on question-writing itself out there, I’m writing about the other stuff) and a cautionary note for those contemplating writing a set. I don’t pretend to know everything, so if you read this and have any additional thoughts/questions/comments, please post them!
====================================================================
So you want to write a housewrite. You’ve seen the announcements of others on the forums, and now you’ve decided it’s time for you to do so yourself. So what do you do?
If your school typically writes a tournament (so if you go to like Hunter or Maggie Walker or something) ask your elders. Otherwise:
The first, and most important thing to keep in mind is that right now you suck at writing. You might be really good at the game of quizbowl itself, but if you’ve never written before, you are not that great at it. (Fun experiment: write three tossups today, save them in a word document, then look at them months or years from now when you have a lot more writing experience. You will cringe.) Your questions might be OK, and could be polished up by a good editor into something which would play very nicely, but if you’ve never done this before there’s no way you can head-edit a well-written tournament. I’m not insulting you, it’s a fact -- I was the same, as was just about everyone else.
So how do you get good enough to write a full tournament? Like everything else, it can only be accomplished with practice. Start small: write a few of the best tossups you can (and spend time on it!) and read them to experienced people on the quizbowl irc, submit your questions to people who know what they’re doing (like the feedback program), or even venture into packet-submission college tournaments (ACF Fall is a thing that happens -- writing a packet will get you a discount, practice, and I’m sure feedback on the quality of your questions if you ask for it). Work on projects under experienced people. The list goes on and on; the most important thing is simply to have practice writing questions before you attempt to write a full tournament.
Flash-forward a few months: you’ve written some questions, gotten some feedback, and think you’re ready to tackle a tournament. Now’s when you open that word document, and see if your initial questions would have been up to snuff! :) The best thing to do now is to send out some feelers within your team. Are you up for hosting and writing a tournament? Is your coach cool with the idea? Most importantly, will your teammates support you? Much of LIST I was done by a teammate of mine and I by ourselves over spring break; had I known the rest would write so little, I may not have tried to tackle the project. Make sure your friends are on board and understand what will be demanded of them!
A much easier solution may be to collaborate with another school or two, especially if they have more writing experience than you. Perhaps, after a year of working as the second-in-command under someone more experienced on a set, you’ll be more likely to do a good job in the lead position the year after. Or, you mostly know what you’re doing, but no one on your team is any good at science or fine arts, and another school has a good science and fine arts writer. One must be very careful with collaboration though -- I highly recommend in collaborative (and all other housewrites) someone be firmly designated as the in-charge head editor. Two of the less fantastically written tournaments of the past year (RM/TP/Bellarmine and FNT) were both collaborations, and the cause of FNT’s problems were six equal “head editors,” none of which took responsibility for the set as a whole, leading to some gross oversights.
Now you need to figure out the difficulty you’re shooting for. In your case, this is quite simple! It’s your first time writing, so you’re shooting for regular difficulty. It’s much better to wind up easier than harder, if you err slightly, so do your best to restrain yourself, and call out your co-writers whenever you think they’re writing too hard of questions.
So now, you’ve made it through all this. You know what you’re doing, you’ve got a corps of mostly dedicated people who mostly know what they’re doing to back you up, and you’re ready to write. I assume you can figure out distributional stuff on your own (you have a little freedom but don’t be too wacky or stupid with it -- just look at other sets’ distributions as models). You now need to set up spreadsheets and the like to organize your writing progress. When I work, I sort it so the columns are the categories, the rows are the packets, and in the boxes go the answerline, color-coded by how done it is (like white for nothing, red for written, yellow for edited, green for packeted/playtested/powermarked, or something similar). Do whatever works for you, and if someone reading this has a different system, I’d love to hear.
While the number of columns is easy to figure out (21 or 22 questions per packet works quite nicely), the number of rows should be selected with greater caution. Frankly put, some sets do not have enough packets to allow the flexibility needed. If you want to be writing a good set, which will allow other hosts the ability to set up a fair, good schedule, 14 packets is the minimum. A tournament in Missouri this year had rooms and moderators enough to expand beyond 24 teams, but GSAC only had 12 packets -- this led to a smaller field cap and an extraordinarily contrived schedule which ultimately ended up messed up. Had GSAC had 14 packets, they could have just easily done preliminary brackets of 6 then rebracketed to 8 or vice versa, and the tournament would have been a much nicer experience for all. I don’t say this to impugn GSAC specifically, many other tournaments had too few packets, but rather to provide an example of how this does indeed cause problems. Hosts should keep this in mind when deciding what to mirror: if you choose to use a set which asininely only 12 packets, not only are you unable to adapt to changing field sizes, but you encourage the writing institution to continue writing too few packets in future years, harming many tournaments to come.
This leads me to one of my two main points in this post, which I won’t claim to have come up with myself (can’t remember who said it though, sorry!): Writing a quizbowl set is a very easy thing to “barely finish.” It’s really really tempting to look at twelve complete packets and have no desire to start on a thirteenth. It’s really really easy to skim a complete set and send it out rather than spend a day proofreading to catch as much as possible. Realize when you post in that forum, writing a good set will be a lot of work. Writing a great set will be even more. If you don’t want to put in the requisite time to turn out a fantastic product, then head-editing is not the right job for you.
So now you’ve written 14+ packets of good questions, and have edited them to the best of your ability. If this is your first tournament head-editing, play-test all your questions. Read the questions out loud to yourself, or a group of people who know what they’re doing, to catch wording errors. More importantly, find someone experienced and get them to look over the set for you. When I say experienced, I don’t mean a college freshman or two who haven’t head-edited anything but worked for Fall Novice once, I mean EXPERIENCED: someone who has edited multiple high school tournaments and can instantly tell a good question from a bad one. A great place to do this is the quizbowl irc channel -- usually it’s just a bunch of semi-busy college people sitting around who are almost always more than happy to be read a packet and provide feedback if you ask them nicely and politely. In fact, it might even be a good idea to playtest the first packet of completed questions, so that you can nip any problems you have in the bud. No one will write your set for you, but people will gladly spend a little time finding weaknesses in the set.
This leads me to my second major point: The best writer/editors are those who listen to the feedback that they’re given. If the people playtesting know what they’re doing, heed their advice! If they tell you clues are bad, replace them. If they tell you a question is not workable, replace it (or figure out why they think it’s unworkable, suggest a fix, and see what they say). It’s really easy to be lazy and not do this, but remember what I said earlier!
So now you’re (mostly) done. Put the questions in packets, powermark them if you’re using powers and you haven’t done so yet (have one person do this near the end, so it’s uniform -- I recommend doing so right before play-testing), and send it out to the people hosting. If this is occurring the Thursday or Friday before the first running of the set, you’re doing it too late. Shoot to have your set done a week early, and don’t let yourself fall behind -- question quality drops massively if you have less time to work, and you should allot the last few weeks to the proofreading/playtesting, as they take a non-negligible amount of time.
Congrats, if you did all this, you wrote a very good tournament, and you can look forward to hearing nice things in forum posts. Remind people not to discuss until all mirrors are done, and if you get specific feedback, fix the relevant questions.
OK THIS PART IS IMPORTANT SO READ IT
Writing a tournament is hard. If you do it, you are making a commitment to do your utmost to make it a fine set of questions for everyone who plays them. If you fail to do this, you are doing a terrible disservice to yourself, the rest of your team, everyone involved in writing the set, the people who host mirrors, and, very importantly, the pyramidal quizbowl community as a whole. Your questions will leave an impression on every team which plays them; for some, it may be the first exposure they have to the notion of pyramidal quizbowl, and if you screw up, you turn them away from the game for a long time, if not forever. Even experienced teams and their coaches may be soured by a poorly produced set of questions. Do yourself and everyone else a favor and give it your all for the next few months to do a good job.
I understand that many of you want to write questions because you want to improve. From time to time, everyone gets the itch to write quizbowl questions. This does not mean, however, that you are ready to produce a tournament, unless you take in and internalize the sober reality that many sets today are subpar and fail to meet the acceptable standards detailed above. It is far far better to be a seemingly insignificant part of a project than start a project on your own that you won’t do properly. If all you’re in it for is improvement, then just write the questions and read them to friends.
tl;dr summary of this entire post (read the whole thing though!): Remember, ask advice and take it to heart. Do not be lazy or bite off more than you can chew. Doing a bad job is a terrible terrible thing, so do a good job. Don't be ashamed to realize that a housewrite is in fact a lot of work, and not for everyone!
If you have any questions/comments/concerns, please post! Good luck writing!
EDIT (6/24/12): It should be noted (since someone has had extensive private discussion with me on this manner) that in the 14-packet example, GSAC wasn't the only culpable set, as the originally-intended-to-be-mirrored VCU/OSU set also had too few packets, and GSAC was chosen to replace it at the last minute; my point still stands that 14 is the minimum acceptable number.