Week 273: Waiting for IT
"Well, shall we go?" "Yes, Let's go"
The box of index cards has expanded. It’s sitting by my left hand with a stack of blanks in front of it, which will get converted into filled cards. As I’ve said before about this little project, I intend it to be an inexhaustible source for question ideas, a sort of anti-writers block, something that can come up with ideas if I can’t.
I can sort of see it morphing into the quiz bowl writer’s version of Oblique Strategies, a way of inspiring creativity through lateral thinking developed by artists Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt. Each card gives you a way to reconsider what you’re working on. So there’s ideas like “Reverse” and “What mistakes did you make last time?” in the deck. But because they are artistically-intentioned cards, they aren't really applicable to quiz bowl. Because the end product of these cards are to create questions, the oblique strategies have to apply to the source material from which are facts come from to become clues. And so the pink cards and yellow cards I’ve broken out are starting to resemble Oblique Strategies.
If you remember from the original design document, Pink cards are those that ask a lot of questions about a subject in hopes of finding three or four questions which have answers convertible to clues. It’s supposed to give you lots of stimulation and multiple approaches so you can find one that pushes you through the process. Pink cards take a while to percolate, I’m only at three of them in the finished set, but each of them could be used repeatedly, even within the context of filling a pack of questions. Here’s one done for writing about a country:
Capital? Former Capital? Largest three cities? Unique languages?
Borders? Regions? / Incorporated Regions?/Seceded Regions?
World Heritage Sites? National Parks? Cuisine?
Mountains/Mountain Ranges? Rivers?Deserts/Forests/Jungles? Roads/Railroads?
Flags? Coats of Arms? National Anthem?
Historical Leaders? Father of the Country? Ancient Empire? Native People? Historical Royal Houses?
Wars? Legislature/Administrative Building/Secret Police?
National Epic/Myth/Religion?
Native Dance/Art/Music/ Nationalist Writer/Composer/Artist
National Businesses: Conglomerate/Car/Airline/Bank?
Sitting and reading a tournament straight through made me notice how often a particular class of answer is consumed in a set; a country could be an answer but the usage of clues could be completely different. A pink card many different ways to write questions on the same class of answer.
The yellow cards are based around the idea of using an outside source, but one that you are familiar with the source’s contents. They’re less reusable than the pink cards because they are more specific, but they’re a lot easier to create. Half of the yellow cards are simple reminders to me that sources in my library exist. The other half are ideas to use the source in a different way, or use the source to approach the theme in a different way. This is actually pretty close to Oblique Strategies in spirit and is a more generalized case of the predictably present information mentioned in week 270, like Peter and the Wolf instruments. Here are some examples:
Select a random country, start from its Britannica history summary https://www.britannica.com/topic/history-of-[nation] or its BBC News summary.
Choose a number from [50, 100, 200, 300, 500]. Open wikipedia to the current year minus the number chosen. Choose an event from that year to write about.
Open the Wikipedia page for Category: Short Story Collections and pick a random collection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Short_story_collections
Think of an answer. Open Wikipedia to "Cultural depictions of [your chosen answer]." If you don’t have an idea for the answer, type “Cultural depictions of “ and see what it offers as autofill.
Take a map, close your eyes, pick a spot, open your eyes.
Look at a timeline, pick a random spot on the timeline, what is directly in the past from that , the future, existing at the same time?
Look at a genealogy tree, are there two people in that tree you recognize? how do they relate?
These generalize to a couple of common strategies that I employ sometimes: “Use your second-best tool.” “Use the source in a different way from what you’re used to.” “Employ random selection.” “Use a visual source and translate it for a non-visual medium.”
Right now I’m trying to write a yellow card for something that has sat in my mind as the quiz bowl equivalent of an earworm. Consider when you’re reading a packet and a word in the question pops out to you, saying “I’ve heard that word before in this question.” Not necessarily “this is where I’d buzz” but this is what would probably shift me over to the answer. I’d like that card to say: “You know that word you heard and thought it might always be a clue to that answer? Put that to the test. Search a question database for that word. If that answer is always the answer for questions mentioning that word, write a question mentioning that word and using that answer, and then write a question with that answer omitting that word.”
I don’t think this is possible to write as a directive to a writer, because it presupposes the writer is reading other people’s works, and having my experience in reading, and noting things on a sheet of paper between rounds. It’s doing manually what the crystal radio project should do automatically. As a yellow card directive it fails by referring to a source material I didn’t create and doesn’t exist.
I’m trying to incorporate a degree of creativity into this because I want the process of bulk production of questions to have creative impulses throughout it. That benefits the players who will be playing on the product questions, and that benefits the writer by avoiding the monotony of production sameness. I recognize that the creative process for quiz bowl will necessarily require scaling up as more players come aboard. You’re never going to see an immense surplus develop, and staying just ahead of demand is an exhausting process, so giving your creativity the chance to flex and lowering the amount of perspiration in inspiration increases the writers’ quality of production. It also serves as a way to bring inspired writing to a lower experience level. When a writer’s muse is truly active and they have inspired questions, they tend to horde the inspiration for those people they most want to impress, usually their peers. But if inspiration is frequent, and it happens for common, limited answer classes, those products of inspiration are likely to be slotted into lower experience tournaments. Those players will be equally inspired by the product, and their experience will be more pleasant.
The day after Memorial Day was a free day for work. They’ve instituted additional holidays into the calendar which make Memorial Day and Labor Day five-day weekends with the title for those Tuesdays “Recovery Days” which is nice, but as someone who uses every ounce of Monday to recover from the HSNCT, and whose family doesn’t get that benefit, it was a weird sensation to have a completely open day.
I had promised myself that I’d spend the bulk of the day writing, and collecting the second part of the book into some sort of order. I spent the morning putting the sections in order, what I’d like to paste in from this, and then I started looking at the holes and figuring out what needed to fill. And so by 3 o’clock, I felt like I had actually made a bit of progress, and I could leave to do some yard work.
When we last wrote it was in the recovery day, setting up for what I expected to be a move out on Wednesday from my office. Before I went to Atlanta on Memorial Day weekend, I had packed up my office expecting to move back to the old building. I brought in banker boxes from home, and packed up my books, the tea tins I inherited from my aunt, and filled tablets and writing implements with notes on old projects. Well, that was done the Thursday before last, and I was told I was on the list to be moved by IT, and it would happen sometime after I got back.
In saying that they were free to move without me being there, I probably cursed the whole thing. I ended up reminding them that Friday of Memorial Day weekend was a company holiday, so they would have probably moved my stuff without any problem. But in saying that, I also told them it was OK to wait until Wednesday. And then the rains came. And moving on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday were impossible. No matter, this week would be fine, and as long as they tell me when they’re moving the machine I remote into, I would be fine to work from home and queue up long processes to run during the move. But because my mother’s foot surgery was rescheduled, I didn’t need to work from home this week. And so I sat in the office on Monday, and Tuesday, and today. I’m not certain if I should unpack anything for fear of immediately needing to repack. I’m not sure if I should just carry a box over since I still have these long regression runs and little to do that’s interactive tasks. I am just kind of stuck in the limbo state, in the rubber room, can’t get too deep into a task, and can’t leave things in the middle of a process. We’re in workday eight of the waiting, and I’m guessing we’re getting to nine. I’ve taken the box of cards to work so I can transcribe notes onto cards while I wait, and that at least is progress.