Week 317: 30 Writing Variations
[As I promised last week, I am going to take you through thirty variation writing assignments for your team. This is not a complete list, but it covers six general types of variations to the writing assignment and before we get into the examples I want to show the intent behind each group, and for those who have been reading since the beginning, I want to highlight where I’ve mentioned these elements in the past.]
I could have stopped at 20, but I wanted to cover all these themes in what you can write. I don’t think you should use all of these in a year, it’s probably a way to change the dynamic of the weekly assignment, but the habit formed in doing the writing without requiring prompting is what we want to promote first. Some of these will require you to choose which variation you’re going to employ before practice: some require knowing if an appropriate question is in the packets for practice, others require prop, or being in the right room of having a full roster of people to employ it. Some will not be right for a room of new players, and some may require experienced players you simply don’t have yet. But each of them pushes an element of the themes below which can help to improve your team.
Themes:
Ownership and sharing - Taking responsibility for what you know, and passing it on to the next iteration of your team. (Ownership)
Ownership is taking responsibility for particular subjects or answers within what is commonly sked in a packet. After one takes ownership of a category, part of the process of writing is to use writing to give teammates enough knowledge of the subject that they can take ownership after the player is gone. For our purposes, this is taking what you know, your experiences, and what you have chosen to learn and turning it into questions so that the knowledge stays with the team after you are gone.
Observation - Becoming aware of the information around you. (Observation)
Observation is one of those skills that is not so much taught as revealed to the writer. If a player discovers the world is full of information which helps them in competition, they become aware that the world is full of information which helps them in daily life, in writing, and generally succeeding in whatever their chosen field will be.
Aleatory - Inspiration through applied chance. (Objects of perfect depth)
This is to solve the problem of boredom, or a lack of inspiration in the writer. The introduction of a random selection when one is unable to choose for themselves is a standard technique of a writer prompt, but its success in our case relies on finding objects of perfect depth to sample for random selection. An object of perfect depth is something that contains a choice of answers to base a question around, where nothing in the work is too obscure to be used as an answer at the level of the writers participating in the process. When a player uses an object of perfect depth to choose what to write, the difficulty question goes away, essentially whatever they choose will be helpful to the team.
The Calendar - Ensuring a constant flow of new ideas. (Creating a calendar)
A while back in this narrative we proposed creating a calendar of events that will occur annually and thus would be things the coach could point out as being important and preparing players to use that information for future competition. If we have that developed that calendar and point to events on that calendar in practice, and we are also making an exercise of question writing in that same practice environment, it makes sense to combine the two activities on a regular basis.
Oulipo - The theory of constraint
You’re going to have to trust me on this one. The context of the previous two entries were the constraint of an answer, or a constraint of inspiration of the answer. Oulipo was a French literary movement dedicated to the constraint of construction. The most famous examples of Oulipo literature are lipograms, works that omit certain letters of the alphabet (e.g., Georges Perec’s A Void, which omits the letter “e”). While I’m not suggesting that sort of meta-construction of questions is useful, understanding how the question is constructed, and then showing how further constraining yourself from that standard is a way to show how to write questions, and how to understand how questions will be written by others.
I was introduced to the idea of Oulipo construction through the old podcast Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir1 ,which tracked a thread between Oulipo writing and the common elements of film noir. Some French films which post-dated the height of film noir took most of the elements of the style as a framework within which to tell new stories. For our purposes, the idea of a writing constraint leading to new questions, and new ways to think about the material in a question.
Change of Viewpoint - Attacking the writing process in different ways.
This is simply mixing up the process of writing by getting you to look beyond the tendencies you the writer have developed over time. These can’t be attacked on the first pass of variations, but they’re designed to prevent boredom or routine from setting in, these variations often require a second person to be involved in the writing process before it is read in practice.
Write about something you did last summer/over break.
Write about something you learned in a class this past week.
Write about something you saw on your phone. This is a manipulation of the social media, a reversal of roles. The common paradigm we state about social media is that it’s consumed. This particular variation challenges that. If they complete the challenge to them this week presents, they’ve been trying to notice details in what they’ve consumed, and possibly pay attention to what algorithms have been feeding them. What the algorithm gives them is something they should feel they should have ownership over, but also should be aware that that is what the algorithm feels should satisfy them. We should not be satisfied with that. A player or writer who takes agency over what they consume is going to be a better consumer over time.
Write a question about some part of a question no one could answer in the last practice. You may need to make them recall the previous practice, or you may choose to state it about the current practice, either works.
Write about a question you got wrong in practice, OR the wrong answer you gave. This is arranging the motivation of the writer to make something memorable for themselves, and thus make it memorable for others.
Take a look at the walls of where you practice. Write about something from there to write about. Inspiration surrounds you, and what is in a classroom is always considered fair game by the writers.
What question didn’t you like in the packet (we just read/we are about to read)? Write a question you like better with that same answer. Sometimes making them work through something they didn’t like is a way to get them to remember it.
What is one thing you know, which you are certain no one else in this room knows? And the follow up questions for the next practice: Why did you choose this, and how did you know no one else knew it? What do you know you own on this team, and how do we make it so it is shared?
As we are reading these questions that people have written, you’ve had a thought about something that these inspired, or something you could do. Write that down now, and that is your subject for next week. This one begins to spread ownership around.
Aleatory: Look at a map, pick out at random a location to write about.
Aleatory: Look at a timeline or chronological list, pick a random spot on the timeline, what is directly in the past from that, the future, existing at the same time?
Aleatory: Look at a genealogy tree or a cladistic tree, are there two things in that tree you recognize, how do they relate?
Aleatory: Pick up a trusted book, and select a page at random. Choose something at random from that page to write about. The trusted book you give them is an object of perfect depth. If they choose the book, they are choosing a book they feel is perfect depth for them. Variation of a variation: One player chooses which book to trust, the other player chooses page at random and selects based on what they know they can write about.
Aleatory: Open a dictionary to a random page, find a word you don’t recognize read the definition. If this word was in a question what would be the answer? This gets them thinking about clues, interesting words that they don’t know, and then forces them to think about how that word can lead them to an answer.
The Calendar: What happened on this day in history?
The Calendar: Choose a number from [25, 50, 100, 200, 300, 500]. Open wikipedia to the current year minus the number chosen. Choose an event from that year to write about.
The Calendar: Look at the calendar of upcoming events and have them write something about something on that calendar. This demands you the coach build your calendar in advance.
The Calendar: Who died in the past year?
The Calendar: Nobel prize week: Who won this year? OR Choose an answer from the lists of previous winners.
The Calendar: First of the year: What has entered the public domain on January 1st?
The Calendar: Beginning of the month: Write from the newest NAQT You Gotta Know.
The Calendar: Look through the most recent award winners in annual prizes/competitions. Write about one winner’s history.
Choose from what is on the most recent study guide you handed out to the team?
Write a question about a subject but until the last clue all of your clues are about the cultural depictions of that subject.
Write about something without writing about the history of it. The problem with practice questions is often that everybody writes the question with the answer “X” when the answer should be “the history of X.” This is my remedy to that.
Write about something in a completely different category from what people would expect. Many years ago, I discovered we needed an urgent replacement question for a set, and I was stuck for the trash question which would fill the slot. Facing writers block, and seeing that my first three ideas for answers were already used in the set and would be bounced, I inverted my query and asked what common names aren’t in the set. I found a very common presidential name was surprisingly missing, and I thought, “that president has been depicted on film, why not see if he was depicted on television?” Well, it ended up in the semi-finals, and it was one of the best-received questions in the set.
Go to a wikipedia entry’s “what links here” page. This is looking at the system in a different way, seeing the connections that are possible, and you can pick and choose the connections to put into your question.
Highlight all the words that are clues in the question you wrote for last week. What are the rest of those words doing? Can you get rid of those words, and add clues which makes the question the same length, with less fat? This is the challenge of journalism, to make every part of your question serve a purpose.
Pair up. Each of you write the first sentence and answer to a question. Hand it to the other person and ask them to write the remaining sentences.
There are certain leadins in a tossup question that strike the team like a bolt of lightning. When you see this happen in practice, ask them all to start with that leadin sentence and fill in that question’s sentences after the leadin. Give them only the leadin sentence, but see if they remember anything that came after it. I have termed this last one “The parable of the Rat and the Ox”, though it’s not a parable, and comes from a children’s book about the Chinese Zodiac. The plot is that in the competition for to be the first animal in the Chinese zodiac, the two candidates were the Rat and the Ox, and they would both parade in the capital before the people, who would choose the one to go first. Stating he would not be lost in the parade, the Rat sought out a magician who made the Rat gigantic. When the parade went through the capital the Rat and the Ox were both cheered by the people, but when the time came to vote, no one voted for the Ox because all they could remember was the giant Rat.
In quiz bowl, there are lots of clues which come up which are like the giant Rat. They take up all the attention in practice. These clues are so memorable we think we will see them again and again and commit them to memory. But because they are so memorable, writers move them down in the question, assuming they lack novelty, after all “everyone has heard that.” Or they don’t mention it at all in the next question to have that answer for the same reason. But the answer remains in circulation, and all those other ordinary clues will stay in circulation. The Ox clues. This particular variation is all about making sure that your players don’t forget the Ox clues for the sake of a Rat clue that they may never see again.
Quiz bowl is full of answers that have a Rat clue something shiny, memorable, and fleeting. Trash in particular survives on the fact that there’s absolutely one incredible clue you can put first for most answers. But if you forget those other clues exist because you’re captivated by the shiny clue, you won’t get anything out of the question being in practice. This variation is to remedy that problem, and to prepare the team for competitions where all the writers have seen all the shiny clues, and have edited them out of the lead of the question.If you get to the end of this and say, “this is being manipulative of your team,” I won’t disagree entirely with you. These are ways to get more out of a practice that is difficult to use when it becomes tedious and repetitive. But if you use variations to tease out lessons about quiz bowl and about their own methods of seeing the world, you can avoid tedium and improve their game, and increase the stickiness of your practices and the writing practice inside your practice.
Incidentally, the Out of the Past podcast is a great use of your time for quiz bowl, and is about the level of a college Introduction to Film course.