The word “only,” an adverb that portends disappointment for the hopeful theatergoer (“standing room only”) and an adjective that mocks the sibling-deprived (“only child”), is a trivia writer’s best friend. Shortly before he died, Dr. Seuss confessed that “Green Eggs and Ham” was “the only book I ever wrote that still makes me laugh.” The actor Bruce Dern, after appearing alongside the Duke in the 1972 western “The Cowboys,” correctly boasted that he was “the only actor who ever killed John Wayne.”
I wrote about these facts, as well as many thousands more, as a staff writer for nine seasons on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” Writing a trivia question that included the word “only” often meant seeing it get on the air; writing a question that included the multiple choice answers “Abraham Lincoln” and “Millard Fillmore” usually meant the answer was the more interesting “Abraham Lincoln.”
At “Millionaire,” one of the biggest challenges as a writer was to continually come up with new material. Every person alive has a small cache of compelling facts tucked away in easy-to-access brain cells marked “Hey, Did You Know …” If your job is to actually write the contents of these thoughts down in digestible language for television, you will most likely deplete your trivia supply in about two weeks. Then you will hit a wall. And that wall will hurt. Because you can’t now just dash off questions like “What color is Big Bird?” (That question doesn’t get viewers itching to reveal the answer to co-workers in the break room the next day. Also, let’s face it, that question stinks.) And you can’t write something that has already been written previously for a show that’s been on the air for years, which frustratingly eliminates a lot.
What are, then, the secrets of a successful game show writer?
First, authorship. This means you must create a question that no one else has asked before. This may sound daunting but it needn’t be. What can one write about nursery rhymes, say, when every possible question about nursery rhymes has already been asked? Get creative. Allow this thought to occur to you – are there any well-known phrases or names whose only vowels are, in order, E-I-E-I-O? Many, it turns out. “Perihelion” is the point in the orbit of a planet where it is nearest to the Sun. The idiom “be in the thick of” also shares the same run of vowels. A third discovery leads to a trivia question that almost writes itself: “If she sang a famous refrain from the nursery rhyme ‘Old MacDonald Had a Farm,’ what pop star would be singing the vowels of her name in order?” Answer: Celine Dion. That’s good trivia. Good, original trivia. Thinking this way – going out to find trivia instead of hoping it finds you – means arriving at your desk each morning with a sense of I-can-write-about-anything instead of there-is-nothing-else-to-write-about.
Second, search engines. (Ah, Google, you and I had ourselves a time, didn’t we?) The trick to shrewdly mining a search engine for golden trivia nuggets is to completely abandon the lesson you just learned about authorship. Now you want other people to do the work for you. T.S. Eliot quipped “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” Savvy game show writers think of logical sentence fragments that, surrounded by quotes and searched for online, will produce interesting trivia that someone else has already dug up and written about using the exact same language you just entered into a search engine box. For example, Google the phrase “the only state George W. Bush.” Just that phrase. Why? It could be that Wisconsin is “the only state George W. Bush” gets his hair cut in (this, I imagine, is not true). It is true, though, that Vermont, according to the hard-working fact-checking department at the Burlington Free Press, is the only one among the 50 states Dubya never visited during his presidency. Finding this out required no calls to the White House media room and no elaborate spreadsheets based on Bush’s travel schedule.
With this example in mind, try Googling phrases like “first Academy Award winner to” and “only city in Europe that” and you’ll start to see what I mean.
Third, diversity. A clubgoer who has one or two moves on the dance floor is like a game show writer whose questions are always about Albert Einstein, the Pacific Ocean and George Washington – boring. After using questions about a dead white guy, the world’s largest ocean and then another dead white guy, a game show needs to switch up the tempo a bit. So, I wrote a question about the National Council of La Raza, the country’s largest Latino civil rights group. I wrote a question about the Professional Art Handlers Local 814, a labor union. (The answer was “Sotheby’s.”) I wrote a question about the Ms. Foundation for Women. All of these questions got on the air. I wrote questions about notable Asian-Americans, African-Americans and American Indians. I wrote about members of these groups even when they weren’t notable. One of my favorites was a rather easy question about a Lakota chief I discovered named Touch the Clouds – the answer was “Tall.”
There is no hitting the wall for a game show writer who can show authorship, search the Web with a few savvy tricks up one’s sleeve and have an eye toward diversity. Of course, there will be slow days and the inevitable dead-end question. In fact, I left “Millionaire” stymied by two pieces of trivia I spent time investigating on and off for years. What exactly does one find at the summit of Mount Everest? Anything? A flag? A sign-in book? An IHOP? And I was never able to determine the meaning behind the name of one of history’s most beloved heroines, Jeanne d’Arc. She was apparently born in the French village Domrémy, not “Arc.” Is it safe to assume her descendants in the Americas established a town called New Arc that would eventually elect a youthful mayor named Cory Booker? I lack answers to these questions to this day. (If you know, tell me in the comments below.)
This year, “Millionaire” began with a new host and, at least in my old chair, a new writer. Every so often, one of my eyebrows arches just a bit when I see or hear the word “only” being used in a news story. This happened the other day when I read about how, in 1999, there was only one member of Congress who voted against issuing a Congressional Gold Medal to Rosa Parks.
The answer? Ron Paul.
If “only” I had discovered that fact before I left “Millionaire,” I could have written about it for the show.
David Levinson Wilk wrote most recently for NBC’s “The Million Second Quiz.” He is the author of the forthcoming “TEDTalks Across, TMZ Down,” a collection of crossword puzzles.
from Digg Top Stories http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/04/secrets-of-a-game-show-writer/
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