Around week 55 I was planning to do a division of quiz bowl questions into two types, which I had broadly defined as writing for bulk production and writing for bespoke production. I shelved it at the time because I had some problems with it. This is the one of the last major points of understanding I need to finish the book, because it allows me to set up a lot of the second section and bridge the gap between televised quiz bowl and the circuit, and other forms of competition.
Bulk question writing is taking one question pattern and applying it to multiple questions, or it is taking a pattern of a question and applying it to the creation of a new question. The starting point is the answer.
Bespoke question writing is finding inspiration from something you learn or remember and converting that learned information into a question. The starting point is the inspiration, which points you to what the answer should be.
If we are to ascribe tendencies to different competitions, it’s clear that televised competitions tends more towards bulk and the circuit tends more to bespoke, but there’s more polarized examples towards either extreme.
The framework of a bulk question can be as complex as you want, but the question's construction has some sort of scaffolding which can be applied to multiple questions. A bonus with a leadin of "Name these X" is a simple framework, just as a tossup about literature that runs "One character in this work [description 1]. Another character in this work [description 2]. In addition to [name 1] and [name 2], [description 3]. For 10 points-- name this book featuring [name 3], written by [author]." The framework can be applied to rapidly develop a set of questions, or can be applied repeatedly to a series of packets.
Bulk begins with the last clue and builds out from that to fill a framework with information.
Bespoke begins with the first clue, and if the first clue's answer has a last clue, so much the better.
Bulk by building out from the last clue accidentally ensures the question will have the best possible chance of conversion by the teams. It does this by taking as a proxy the writer's expectation that they would be able to answer the question.
Bespoke attempts to ensure the population will get the maximum possible enjoyment out of the question, and uses as the proxy of that maximizing the enjoyment of the writer in writing the question.
When you are first writing questions, you are invariably operating in the bespoke realm. Partly that's because you have the spark of "that will be something I can write about," but it's also because you haven't internalized lots of patterns that questions come in, and how to write them for yourself. This is why the circuit tends more towards a bespoke style, most writers in quiz bowl don’t need to create enough questions to need to use bulk techniques.
Bulk comes from tabular data, the orderly information I've been discussing throughout the book. And that is its power, it is comparatively easy to take what you learn from writing one question and modify the construction process to create another question.
Bespoke starts with inspiration and first clues, first clues are often unique, so much so that they're able to uniquely identify their answer without regards to the answer's classification.
Neither approach is exactly wrong, but taken to the extreme, they become impractical.
Bulk by itself is drab, not necessarily for the general audience, but for the audience with experience, and ultimately for the writer. Bulk can burn you out.
Bespoke by itself is wonderfully fulfilling for the writer, but it takes too long to create enough questions for them to be used effectively. Bespoke can exhaust you before you reach your goals, and demands that your audience finds the same facts as fascinating as you do. And when the audience fails to find it as interesting as the writer, that is the perilous point where the writer can blame their audience, rather than learning that your audience is composed of different people with different interests, and learning that you must cater to your whole audience.
Bulk and bespoke are two poles of an axis along which questions can be aligned, and neither can exist for long without the other.
Bulk: an example
I want to show you bulk in the purest possible sense. I walked through the bulkest of bulk processes myself about 20 years ago, when NAQT did contract work for msn.com, but I can't show you that product as well as this video does.
This is the pilot for Double Cross, which failed to get on the air in this form but was reworked into the 1980-82 game show Bullseye. (I should thank Wink Martindale and his people for putting this on youtube.)
First recognize this is simply to show what game play would look like, and how the competition would happen, so everyone in this pilot is scripted to walk through all the paths of the game. The questions are the absolute last priority of the competition. Notice also that though they want to show categories that could come up in the game once it's completed, they return to a very small set of categories which they have written the questions for. And those questions are simple and could have been generated out of a couple pages of an almanac in an afternoon.
This is the ne plus ultra of bulk question creation. Understand the status of Barry-Enright productions at this point: They've had success with The Joker's Wild and Tic Tac Dough, and they'd figured out that if you change the format of the upfront game slightly, you would be able to support different television programs with essentially the same source of questions, all you need to do is scale it. Since Double Cross was investing all its effort in the items in front of the camera in setting up the pilot, the questions were going to be something that was produced by the same writers as the other two shows, but as additional work to that. They were probably not a priority relative to the other shows, and were probably not done well ahead of time of the taping, probably inserted into the script a day or so ahead of schedule.
If we accept that Double Cross is a degenerate example of too much bulk action, we can use it to define some of the rules when it can be used. Bulk question creation is appropriate and advantageous to use when:
- There are time constraints: You have a definite deadline or series of deadlines and you cannot miss a deadline.
- There are minimum production constraints: Corresponding to the constraint of time is the knowledge that the project must be a certain size; a certain number of rounds, episodes, or other benchmark of events.
- All the competitors are not exposed to all the questions: This means that you can compress the usage of bulk questions into a smaller number of encounters people have with the questions. In our examples of exploiting repeats in televised quiz bowl, we use this knowledge. If we see two consecutive matches where the teams face questions on planets, we figure the next match is likely to have it as well. The writer has used bulk question writing to fill multiple needs in multiple events with the same set of starting information populating the last clues.
- The audience does not get to see all the questions in a way that exposes the pattern of bulk questions: Ask for the same type of information in a question twice and it's okay, but you need to explain that you're doing it. Ask for the same type of information ten times in a row and it's repetitive, unless you explicitly group them all together. In the era where bulk construction would have been dominant, the writer could be assured that if they split the questions amongst multiple episodes, the audience would not be able to see a pattern. Since the pattern is broken up by weeks of episodes airing, there's little chance someone could see the pattern.* Consider this analogy: every day your local newspaper publishes a bridge column with a hand to analyze. If there was a pattern in the deal, say, every day the six of diamonds was dealt to West, would you notice it? How long would it take someone experienced with bridge to notice this? If there were only 1000 columns written and after that the hands repeated, would you notice or would someone experienced with bridge notice**? In both cases, you have to have some expert observation to capture the pattern. This is a bit of a problem for the writer: if the viewer notes one or two patterns, they feel observant and they feel better about the program because they have cracked a little bit of the secret code of the system. But if they find a bunch of patterns, they may lose interest because the show becomes predictable to them.
*This is now significantly broken by youtube and station websites for televised quiz bowl, but few people notice, and even fewer have a way to take advantage of this being broken.
**For those of you who strive to see the patterns once they're revealed to you, both of those examples were made up. But if that is your instinct, you've come to the right competition for you.
The other thing about bulk production is that it is fundamentally limited by the length of the question. That is the shorter the question, or the fewer the clues, the more likely an exact repeat will appear. Were Double Cross to get on the air, they wouldn't be able to use these one-fact questions for very long at all, but it could survive a very long time with two or three clues in a question.
Bulk scales wonderfully. I think this gets at the root of what they were trying to do, in creating Double Cross and then Bullseye. A third show which uses similar questions to the other two, means you can then take bulk questions and apply them in three different locations where their patterns are dispersed. Say I write 15 questions in bulk on a single theme. I can distribute those into three different shows, appearing in three different places in those shows' runs. And then if I don't use the full allotment of questions on one show, I can roll what's needed over to the next one. You can even produce more questions in bulk, and never create visible patterns that either the players can exploit or the audience will notice.
Bulk is unobtrusive. When I discussed automation I mentioned that you rarely have protests about questions that were automated, because they were imitative of previously acceptable questions. Bulk questions, derived from the same sort of sources as automated questions have the same quality. They don't need to repeat facts, but they do need to repeat styles.
If my point is valid, (that there should be questions which are constructed to be only for practice, or to train a team in certain areas of knowledge,) bulk is valuable in that setting.
Bespoke is the ideal that most writers aim to create for themselves, but bespoke writing hinges on finding inspiration. And consistent and plentiful inspiration is not something that other pieces of question construction make conducive. (For example, consider the effect of the distribution.) Working from inspiration also gets you into the trap of needing inspiration for each clue of the question, which is simply not necessary. Bespoke can also put you into the trap of not getting further inspiration, leaving you stranded with an incomplete question.
Bespoke writing does not need to be the enemy of bulk writing. The way to progress is to yoke bespoke clues to a common established bulk question template. This organizes the question, and gives you an endpoint to work towards. The problem with yoking the two is you need to have some idea of the templates and bulk writing that can be used to shape a great bespoke start. That, like everything in quiz bowl, comes into focus with experience.