Trivial Tips

Tonight, I've been writing the trivia questions for the Wednesday morning trivia game on "the station".  I usually devote some times Monday and Tuesday nights to churn out 3 topics of 10 questions each.  Since I've been doing it over a year, I am beginning to cheat a little and reuse old lists.  But I've discovered that I've improved in my trivia writing and the old questions are not as good.  Here are some tips...in case you ever find yourself needing to write trivia questions:

- Choosing a topic is the hard part.  You need to pick something relatively broad or you will run into making impossible questions.  For example - The Statue of Liberty - sounds like a nice topic, but you exhaust the common knowledge questions pretty quickly and start having to use ones that no one can answer. - I.e.  How tall is the Statue of Liberty's left toe?  A better topic is Pizza Toppings - because there are more than 10 commons ones and you don't have to make your questions terribly straightforward.
- People like a little challenge.  They don't necessarily want to play jeopardy.  I like to make the questions just slightly past what everybody knows - or to ask the question in a round about way so that they have to think a little before they answer, but will still usually get the question right.  (I.e. make the clue the definition of a homonym of the actual answer)
- Lists of words with the same letter or prefix make good questions because you can get into multiple topics under one topic - that is - it generates lots of questions, not leaving you at #7 for half and hour.
- 5th, 6th and 7th grade academic questions are good because they are not so hard and not so easy - plus there are tons of these list already made up online!
- Foreign language questions are easy to make up.  For example, the topic could be "Good Morning" and each clue would be "Good Morning" in a different language and you would have to guess.
- True and False questions....are not that fun.

I guess that's my list.  Almost anything could make a good topic or answer.  Sometimes I've found the best topic when brainstorming answers for an impossible list. 

Writing trivia week after week can get tedious, but I am so glad Vacation Bible School is over!