Ken Jennings interviewed Carlo Panno, who (in the ’80s) wrote questions for Jeopardy! Part 1 is fairly Jeopardy!-specific — what the process is like, the life cycle of a category. Part 2 pulls back the camera, adding more perspective on general question-writing issues.

Jennings asks Panno how he gauged the difficulty of questions, since (in theory) the clues on Jeopardy! get more difficult the more money they’re worth. “It’s from the gut, mostly,” replies Panno. “You use your instincts and your knowledge of your knowledge.”

It’s good to know even the guys in the big leagues have a hard time with that — it’s still difficult for me to predict how difficult players will find a round. Even the kind of players matters — I used popular and relatively easy rounds from the Old Pequliar at a recent private event, but since the private event players were generally less trivia-savvy, they found them all very difficult. Lesson learned. I hope.

What makes a great question, Jennings asks. “The leaner and more elegant, the better I liked them,” responds Panno. Solid gold advice for anyone writing, well, anything, but it’s excellent trivia writing advice.

And Panno is another voice in the chorus reminding quiz writers not to lose sight of what makes trivia quizzes fun:

I felt pretty good about getting all three contestants to get it wrong on my NBC DIDN’T CALL IT “SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE” FOR TWO YEARS BECAUSE OF A 18-WEEK “SNL” ON ABC STARRING HIM but it was called to my attention that everybody getting it wrong is a bad thing.

Bold emphasis mine. As I learned from experience, it’s a lot easier to write questions that stump everyone than to write questions that most players can get right. And players definitely prefer the latter.

A few of the snap decisions I had to make on last Tuesday’s quiz:

Question: According to legend, Laocoon and Cassandra both warned against accepting what large gift?
Correct answer: the Trojan Horse
Team asked: Can we have credit for “horse”? They didn’t call it the Trojan Horse.
Verdict: No. Too general. I would’ve given credit for “big wooden horse” or something, but not just horse.
In the cold light of day: I probably should’ve given them the point. In Quiz Bowl or on Jeopardy!, no, but for pub quiz, probably OK.

Question: In Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Sleeping Beauty, what present does Carabosse give Princess Aurora on her sixteenth birthday?
Correct answer: spindle
Team asked: What about “spinning wheel”?
Verdict: OK.
In the cold light of day: I’m still OK with it, though a friend of mine noted that they aren’t the same thing.

Question: In the O. Henry story “The Gift of the Magi,” Jim sells his watch so he can buy what present for his wife Della?
Correct answer: combs
Team asked: Will you take “brush”?
Verdict: No, because they’re not the kind of combs you use to comb your hair, so a brush is a different kind of thing altogether.
In the cold light of day: Good call.

Question: Bob Dylan tells Mr. Jones — rather than Mr. or Mrs. Charles — that “something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is” in what song?
Correct answer: “Ballad of a Thin Man”
Team asked: What about just “Thin Man”?
Verdict: No, because a) that just capitalizes on my hint, and b) it’s not the complete title.
In the cold light of day: Good call.

As I mentioned on Seattlest, I passed the in-person Jeopardy! audition in Seattle a couple of weeks ago. Now I officially have about a 1 in 6 chance of appearing on the show in the next couple of years. I’m coming out ahead regardless — I won a Jeopardy! home game when bwouns from the Ken Jennings Message Board misremembered what year the show came back on the air.

One thing the Jeopardy! people said that stuck with me: The people on the show want you to win money. They’re not there as your adversary — your fellow contestants are your adversaries.

When I started writing quizzes, I had to learn that. In my first few quizzes, I deliberately included questions that I knew would be difficult, possibly even stumpers. At least one per round, sometimes two.

Why? I had in the back of my head that I was competing with the players. Somehow it was points for me if I stumped them.

It took reading some other people’s advice on writing questions — particularly Jennings in Brainiac, and the guys at the Trivia Hall of Fame.

Turns out it’s a lot more fun to host when you try to write questions that a lot of people can answer. I definitely still try to challenge players — a great question rewards lateral thinking. But stumping them isn’t that hard to do, and it’s not much fun when you’re on a team with a half-empty answer sheet.

I’m not there to beat the players. I’m there to give teams a good playing field where they can compete with each other.

A friend of mine who’s hosting at the Old Pequilar next week corralled me before last week’s quiz. “What do you think of Person X for the movie round?” she asked.

Brief explanation: the movie round at the OP always involves nine questions with movie titles as the answer. Question 10 is always “Who appeared in all of these movies?” So constructing a round involves picking out an actor or actress and working backwards from there.

I won’t share Person X’s name, in case my friend uses them next week. But her question made me consider what my movie round rules of thumb are.

“Hmm,” I said. “I think it’s a good idea, but I don’t know if people will know the name.” And that’s the key: to be fair, the movie round’s common denominator needs to be someone who players not only recognize, but can name.

I call it the David Warner rule. Another friend of mine wanted to write the quiz one week. He wrote a movie round using David Warner for question 10. I probably would’ve let it go, but the two people I shared the host slot with vetoed it. “I’ve subscribed to Entertainment Weekly for five years and I’ve never head of David Warner,” said one of them. He knew all the movies in question, and (when prompted) recognized Warner’s face, but had no idea what the guy’s name was.

My friend rewrote the round using Luis Guzman, who probably pushed the envelope a little bit, but enough teams got the question that it proved OK.

These days, when I want to make the movie round tricky but still playable, I look for people who are pretty famous but not necessarily for their film roles. Three examples: August 7, January 29, and April 10. That last one probably pushed the envelope again; if I used that person again, I might make the other nine questions even easier.

Of course, the challenge is part of the fun of the movie round. The David Warners of the world may be too obscure — and the Amrish Puris of the world are right out, at least in an average US bar — but I don’t think it’s much fun to have the answer be Brad Pitt or George Clooney, either. When you can guess the answer within two movies, even if you don’t regularly see 100+ movies a year, you could use a little more challenge.

Here’s what I do: When I’ve got an actor in mind, I ask my wife if she’s heard of them. If so, yay. If not, I usually scrap the idea.

Random closing thought: I really wanted to do a round with John Waters in the Q10 slot, but he hasn’t appeared in enough movies to make it work well. Take more acting gigs in other people’s films, John!

It’s an esseintial part of hosting, but I hate having to make judgment calls. I can sympathize with both sides — it’s frustrating to be denied credit for knowing the right answer but not articulating it correctly, but it’s also frustrating to see people get credit for something you remembered accurately and they didn’t.

Last night, for some reason, was rich in arbitration opportunities. The three I remember:

1: Geography
I screwed up when I wrote a question. At some point while futzing with word order, I dropped “the longest” from “What river forms part of the border between Ontario and New York?”

The answer I wanted, and read as correct: the St. Lawrence. Another correct answer: Niagara.

A couple of teams came up to ask about that, and I thought I remembered the Niagara being part of the St. Lawrence. But I opted to give them their points. Unfortunately several other teams who wrote Niagara didn’t ask me about it, and I was delegating data entry to someone else, so several teams didn’t get credit for a correct answer.

Happily, this morning I discovered that adjusting all the scores to give credit for Niagara didn’t affect the final standings. Whew.

Lesson learned: announce any inclusion decisions — “Did you write Niagara? Come up and let me know.” — and take advantage of a data entry person to double-check that. Double-checking all the answers is a lot harder when I’m hosting solo, though.

2a: Name the bride (picture round)
The picture: Uma Thurman in Kill Bill v. 1.

The controversy: I wanted “Beatrix Kiddo” as the answer. A number of teams said “The Bride.”

Result: I gave credit for “the bride,” then heard a (justifiable) mass outcry from teams that had the correct correct answer. So teams that answered “Beatrix Kiddo” got 2 points, while “The Bride” got 1.

If I were doing it over again, I’d be a hardass and only give the point for Kiddo. And I’d write “not ‘the Bride’” on the answer sheets. Including the Bride of Frankenstein as a possible answer opened up a can of worms on what I meant by “name,” so I understand the confusion, but I also remember, as a player, being annoyed when teams got credit for answers that weren’t as good as mine.

In short, the team that wrote “James=pussy” by Uma was right.

2b: Name the bride (picture round)
Controversy: A photo of JFK and Jackie post-ceremony, cutting their wedding cake. I accepted “Jackie Bouvier” or “Jackie Kennedy” as correct answers, but nixed “Jackie Onassis.”

I stand by this one. It’s obvious from the photo who Jackie just married; she wasn’t Jackie Onassis when the photo was taken. Yeah, teams who wrote “Jackie O” knew who I was talking about, but accuracy counts on quiz night.

I’m also not sorry in retrospect for not accepting Twin Peaks as an acceptable substitute for Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me.

“Who was the first American in space?”

I encountered this question years ago at the George & Dragon. And it remains the most annoying trivia question I’ve ever been asked, as a player.

Why? Because the answer was “John Glenn.”

Unfortunately for the quiz host, John Glenn was the first American to orbit the earth. Alan Shepard was the first American in space, as just about any reference material you consult will be happy to tell you.

When the host said “John Glenn,” protests exploded like strikes in a bowling alley. But she insisted she was right.

Of course, that’s the quiz host’s preogative. When I host at the Old Pequliar, one of the rules is that, for the purposes of the quiz, I know what I’m talking about, and there will be no arguments. It’s a rule I inherited and decided to keep, because lord knows I don’t want to get into cite-fests in the middle of a quiz.

Because of that, though, I make sure I get my facts right. I double-check answers. I cite a source in the question, if necessary. And I anticipate common objections for when someone does want to quibble so that I can provide a more detailed explanation.

The John Glenn question was asked years ago, at this point, and I’ve bored many people talking about it. Some point out that anyone else who said Shepard got it wrong, too. True enough. But all those teams that said John Glenn? They earned an undeserved point. And I’m sure more than one team gave the correct incorrect answer.