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.