Table of Contents

Introduction & Basics

This article is written by Caroline Mao and created as a literature writing resource for WORKSHOP, a three-dot difficulty set which aims to mentor new writers. As such, it is primarily intended as advice for writing literature questions at that difficulty. While some of this advice is not applicable at different difficulty levels or sets which operate on different models, and a significant amount is WORKSHOP-specific, you may still find much of it helpful for other sets.

For ease of referencing, this article is divided into sections based on each step of the writing process. While you can read this entire document at once, you may also find it helpful to refer to the table of contents and skip around to whatever sections suit your current needs best. I've also included comments for definition/concept clarifications or other helpful notes. Click a highlight to see its comments.

Though this may include advice helpful for all categories, it is not intended to cover universal basics, like constructing your sentences to flow well, writing clues which are uniquely identifying, or making sure your answerline is the appropriate difficulty. The WORKSHOP manual includes information on this.

Much of my advice is not objective or universally applicable. This is written specifically for a set I'm editing and thus adheres to my own work style and preferred methods. It is also intended for beginning writers, though I hope writers of all skill levels will get something out of it.

You can find a PDF of this guide here.

The Big Picture: Questions to consider

Before you begin writing, think about the following. There is not necessarily a single right answer; it's meant to help frame your perspective.

• How do people engage with and learn about literature? Do they read it casually, for leisure? Study it in classes? Go to events about literature? Hear about it from friends or social media? Stare at SparkNotes in the hopes they can power a tossup this Saturday? Which ways of learning should you reward?
• How do people read? Closely, examining it on a word or sentence level? Searching for overarching themes or motifs? Skimming to get the basics of what's happening? Just for fun, without necessarily thinking about it critically (not that they're mutually exclusive)? From start to finish, out of order, or reading only excerpts which snag their attention? Which ways of reading should we reward?
• What inspires authors to write? From another angle, what do people write about? Broadly, the same topics have inspired writers to write since the beginning of time: love, death, politics, religion, health, family, friendship, romance, sexuality, food, the body, nature, etc. Try to look at authors at the higher level of what they're trying to convey instead of immediately breaking them down into plot details and character names.
• Why do we remember certain writers, but not others? The quizbowl canon asks about certain writers but not others—why? Is it because of how good a writer they are? How innovative? How relevant what they're writing about is? How much we can relate to them? How much they conform to our own personal tastes, biases, and background? How much they're discussed in certain contexts (e.g. academia)? How important they were considered at the time? How privileged they were? How easy it is to write questions about them?
• What makes a writer or work worth being asked about? In essence, 1. why are they important, and 2. why are they suitable to be asked about in quizbowl? These questions overlap, but they aren't the same. This is an especially good question to ask yourself when writing your hard parts and lead-ins, or anything that's canon-expanding.

Basic Advice

Cool, I just asked you a bunch of super abstract questions, but we do actually need to get around to deciding your answerline and laying out each of your clues. Here's some basics:

• If you can read the material you’re asking about, and it is worth the time investment (or you just find it really interesting!), read it. See Finding sources.
  • If you’ve read it, pick memorable clues. If you cannot remember something you want to clue happening when you read it (unless you read it a long time ago), then don’t expect the player to do so either.
    • On memorable clues: what you remember well may not what others necessarily remember well! Please check outside sources—if the thing you are cluing has been written about before, particularly in an academic context, then that's a good sign others find it memorable and significant as well.
  • If you can’t read it, then generally, you should try to ensure your first 2-3 clues are from a source that isn’t Wikipedia, and preferably not SparkNotes either. This is somewhat difficulty-dependent, e.g. if you're cluing from harder works early on, the knowledge it tests of that harder work should accordingly be easier to find on the Internet.
    • Remember to include easy and middle clues as well!! The last half of your tossup (at minimum) is things that should have come up before, because the vast majority of players have not read these works and this is where they will be buzzing.
    • It can be helpful to use Wikipedia / SparkNotes / etc as a starting point to figure out what parts of a text to read or research more deeply, as they can often highlight key moments, themes, and motif in a text. An issue with relying solely on these sources is that they often miss important details and context you'd get from digging more deeply into the text and surrounding scholarship.
  • Reading part of the material/key scenes and excerpts rather than the entire thing is also good and efficient in a pinch.
• Vary your bonus structure. People make the first part the hard part too often. It is good to have variation throughout a set so bonuses don't become predictable, and a useful exercise to see the different ways you can structure a bonus (the order of the parts, the difficulty of each part, the type of answerline, etc.). There are many angles from which to approach the same material.
• If you’re cluing a quote from long fiction (or even from longer short works), it should be important or highlight something overarching which is important—a quote likely to be studied if you’re reading it in class/writing a paper on it. Otherwise, it's probably quite hard to remember.