Contra Bruce, I don't think these buzz distributions are off base; they look basically how I'd expect and want them to look, as both an editor and player. To me, quizbowl is a game that mixes fast-paced and extremely competitive gameplay with brief moments of respite and strategic contemplation. While I occasionally enjoy playing a tournament such as ACRONYM in which every question threatens to be converted on the first clue, I don't think I would enjoy a higher-level academic event in which I had to be 100% focused on achieving a millisecond buzzer advantage on every sentence of every tossup. I appreciate how editors are frequently able to find interesting, deep clues for familiar material that set the table for the rest of the question (and occasionally reward me other someone else for knowing those clues).
I do agree with Bruce and others in this thread who have pointed out that some lead-ins are obscure to the point of uselessness. I suspect that some of these are a result of an answer that is simply too hard; if you write on a Regionals answerline at Fall, not only are fewer players going to know it at the end, but fewer players are going to know all of the clues going up the line; for sufficiently difficult answer lines, no one in the field might know more than a clue or two about the subject, turning most of the tossup's material into dead air. But that's not really a problem with the lead-in so much as with answer selection. (Another answer selection issue that can result in a useless lead-in is picking an answer line before investigating whether there are enough buzzable clues to support it, pressing on with writing even when it turns out there are not, and being forced into using some obscure lead-in with 41 Google results as a consequence. Again, this isn't really a lead-in issue.) It's also possible that some lead-ins are obfuscated into unbuzzability by writers who use de-specifying language like "a certain character" out of fear that the clue will otherwise be too easy; that's fairly straightforward to fix by just picking a clue that is difficult enough so you can describe it in all its particulars and proper nouns without fear.
I'm now going to perch on my highest armchair and postulate about a method of tossup construction that can result in useless lead-ins of the kind that Bruce seems to lament. I'll contrast this method with what I consider a better one and walk through how I wrote a particular tossup that I think offers a good contrast. (I'm flattered at Bruce's description of my difficulty-assessing abilities, but there's nothing supernatural about it; after a lot of trial and error, I've come up with some good methods for writing questions that are mostly clue-dense, interesting, and gettable, and I will share some of those below.)
In the method of tossup construction that will serve as my bogeyman in this discussion, the writer views the tossup as a hodgepodge of clues that all happen to point to the same answer line. The function of the lead-in in such questions is not to set the table for the clues that follow, or to introduce the little story that the question is telling, but simply to take up the space after the tossup number and be less famous or buzzable than the sentence that follows. Writers occasionally try to spice up questions of this construction by writing a complex answer line or finding an amusing anecdote as a lead-in, but this can itself be a problem. (I'll set aside issues related to answer lines for this discussion and focus on the practice of finding an amusing lead-in to add panache to an otherwise-uninspired question.)
The issue with this writing method is that there is no teleological framework by which the writer can judge the obscurity and relative difficulty of any given clue. For instance, there are almost infinitely many ways to write tossups on basic answers like, say, "rivers." An interesting way would use that answer line as a way to ask about, say, a body of study within earth science, cultural studies, or religion. The most boring possible way to do so is haphazardly to pick three or four rivers from around the world, guess at how famous they are relative to each other and order them accordingly, find a random clue for each, and call it a geography tossup. This would be boring even if the first clue was something amusing like "Richard Nixon once threw 18 Big Mac wrappers into one of these geographic features while raving about the communist threat." (Although, if you managed to find five straight clues as amusing as that entirely made up anecdote, and they were gettable and arranged properly, I would concede that you'd written a good tossup; clue quality can sometimes overwhelm a lack of structure.)
The issue is that, if you found a funny clue along those lines, you might be tempted to use it as a flavorful lead-in for an otherwise bland question regardless of how many people actually know it. Relatedly, such a clue does not fit within any external body of knowledge about "rivers," and thus the writer has no guidance on how relatively famous any given clue is to another, or any signposts for figuring out if the clue is well known to anyone else who is interested in a particular topic. (This is because a tossup on four haphazardly chosen "rivers" isn't even really on a topic at all!) In short, the hodgepodge-style tossup is a receptive shell for amusing lead-ins but its lack of structure does not help the writer think about how famous those lead-ins are relative to the other clues or whether they're even known at all.
The Gallant to this story's Goofus is what I would call a "coherent" tossup. By coherent, I mean only that the writer considers the tossup to be more than a collection of clues that are isolated from one another but all point to the same answer; instead, the writer comes up with a set of clues that all relate to both the answer line and to each other to test on some coherent body of knowledge related to the subject of the question.
I'll offer an example by working through how I wrote a particular tossup for EFT.
Whenever I set out to write a question, I first have to think of something to write about. I don't keep a notebook for this, but I read quite a bit and watch movies and listen to podcasts. When I sit down to write, I think about the category for a bit. If I can't remember a good idea from something I've learned recently, I think of a random topic, and then I go to Wikipedia or Google and start drilling into that topic until I think of a good idea for a question. Importantly, when I say "good idea," I don't mean "good answer line"; I mainly think about the conceit of the question, or the basic body of knowledge that it will test, and then I think of the various answer lines that I could write to test for that same idea and choose the one that I think will be the easiest for players to comprehend and convert. (I also often rewrite questions if I figure out a better way to ask about the same body of knowledge, or if a better idea comes up in my research for a particular question.)
In the case of this particular EFT question, I'd just been reading through some of Richard Hofstadter, and I remembered seeing (but not reading) his essay about John C. Calhoun. It struck me that a tossup on Calhoun's political writings would be a good way to ask about a fairly basic American history topic (Calhoun and the politics of antebellum America) in a coherent, interesting, and gettable way. In this case, it seemed like the best answer line for the topic was Calhoun himself, but I was open to changing that, or refocusing the question entirely, if interesting new avenues opened up during the research and writing.
(Contrast this with the hodgepodge method of writing on Calhoun, which would take three or four pieces of information related to the man and his life and arrange them in perceived order of difficulty. Such a tossup could very loosely cohere around Calhoun's biography, but although its clues would all point to Calhoun, they would not necessarily have any relation to each other, and there would be less of an external structure for difficulty comparisons.)
Once I have a particular conceit or theme in mind, I start looking for the basic topics that should be in the question. Usually, I have a good idea about what two of those clues are going to be (the giveaway and the piece of information that inspired me to write the question in the first place). Then I'll often head over to Wikipedia or Google (often Google Scholar) to look around and make sure that the topic I'm thinking of is actually a coherent "thing" and not some random association in my head. (At higher difficulty levels, literature reviews and PhD theses are especially good for this, and can often provide the skeleton for an entire tossup or bonus.) I do occasionally write tossups themed around random associations in my head, but in those cases, I take special care to make sure that my clues are all highly interesting and worth the detour into vanity.
In this case, I was certain that Calhoun's political writings were a coherent topic, and I thought that I'd use the Hofstadter essay and the South Carolina Exposition and Protest as an early clue and late clue, respectively. Although I dimly recalled that Calhoun wrote a longer work of political theory, I wanted to make sure that there was something notable to put in the middle. And yes, I remembered correctly, and the book was called
A Disquisition on Government.
After (or sometimes during the process of) researching possible clues, I set them down in rough question form. I find it helpful to write the giveaway first, and build the question backward from there, because it prevents the late-middle clues from becoming too cramped and the lead-in from becoming too expansive. And then I tinker a lot with the wording to ensure that I'm hitting my length target, phrasing everything clearly and unambiguously, and arranging each sentence pyramidally (sentences have to internally phrased in pyramidal fashion, and not just organized that way relative to each other!).
Here, I wanted the giveaway to say that Calhoun advocated nullification and was from antebellum South Carolina. I knew that the clue about his tariff opposition would flow into that giveaway, and I figured that adding something about the nullification crisis would also, despite being slightly off the "written works" theme, be a good immediately-pre-FTP clue, and would in any event be a good way to show how he put his philosophy into practice. I thus phrased the last two sentences: "This man and another politician from the same state, (*) Robert Hayne, offered toasts praising state liberty during an 1832 crisis that this man helped precipitate while serving as vice president. An 'exposition and protest' against the “Tariff of Abominations” was written by, for 10 points, what antebellum politician, an advocate of nullification from South Carolina?"
Atop those late-middle and giveaway clues, I placed two middle clues: the earlier one about Calhoun's
Disquisition, and the later one describing the Exposition and Protest. In the various overview sources I saw, including Wikipedia, the
Disquisition seemed to be the kind of thing that could be name dropped in power, and its most important concept seemed to be that of the "concurrent majority" to resolve questions of federalism. And I thought the Exposition and Protest was important enough to warrant a descriptive clue that was substantively evocative and also provided some context about authorship and date. So I wrote the middle two sentences as "This man proposed resolving federalism questions via the concept of 'concurrent majority' in his posthumously published treatise
A Disquisition on Government. This man wrote that the 'right of judging' is an 'essential attribute of sovereignty' in a document that he authored anonymously in 1828."
Finally, I was pretty convinced that Hofstadter's take on Calhoun was known to at least a few players (it is an influential essay, as far as I know), and that it would serve as an interesting contextual clue (Hofstadter is an American historian, the "master class" is a slaveocracy term, Calhoun was notable for both his politics and his political theory) for players who hadn't heard of it. So I wrote the first clue as "Richard Hofstadter claimed that this man was 'probably the last American statesman to do any primary political thinking' in an essay stating that this man foreshadowed and inverted communist ideas and calling him the 'Marx of the Master Class.'" The set editors rightly thought that this was too long and cut the words "stating that this man foreshadowed and inverted communist ideas," but left the rest of the text in this clue and the rest of the question unchanged.
The question was converted in all rooms (no surprise, Calhoun is a middle-school American history staple), powered in 17% of rooms, and negged in 10% of rooms. (The averages for the tournament were 90% conversion, 19% power, 22% neg.)
The buzz distribution looked like
this
About 3 buzzes near the end of the first sentence, a trickle of powers and negs up to the power mark, and then fairly steady conversion to the end. (I suspect that the plateau near the end was on the "exposition and protest" clue right before FTP.)
I wouldn't claim that this is the perfect tossup, but I think it shows the strength of picking an easy answer line and using it to clue a coherent body of knowledge. The buzz distribution is fairly steady, all of the clues generated at least a couple buzzes, and everyone got it at the end.
Because I knew that the literature surrounding questions of state and federal power, including Calhoun's writings specifically, were a very relevant topic in American history, it was very easy for me to arrange the clues in the order of their notability within that body of knowledge. And because knowing the structure of that body of knowledge allowed me to assess the relative importance of Richard Hofstadter's essay within it, I was able to pick a lead-in clue that was both interesting and useful to players. With the aid of experience, all this took me about 20 minutes, most of which I spent reading the Hofstadter essay.
Had I simply selected a few haphazard clues from Calhoun's life and the scholarship surrounding it, I would not have had those advantages, and I may have picked an amusing but unbuzzable clue to sit atop the question. (I googled around for something funny but obscure about Calhoun that I might have used as a lead-in in a past life, and although he seems to have been a rather dour and boring person, I did find an anonymously reported "anecdote of the Civil War" in which Calhoun had a dream that George Washington told him to look at his hand, and when he did, the black spot of Benedict Arnold appeared on it. It has
fewer than 100 Google results.)