How to write quiz questions

That is the constraint everything else follows from. A quiz question is heard once, in a room with background noise, by people holding drinks. It is not read carefully by somebody sitting at a desk.

So: one clause where possible, the subject early, and the thing being asked at the end. "Which country has the most time zones?" works. "Of the countries listed below, which, including its overseas territories, spans the greatest number of distinct time zones?" does not, and it is not a harder question, it is the same question, worse.

Never use a double negative. Never ask which statement is not untrue. A room that has to parse a sentence twice has stopped enjoying itself.

A round of ten should not be ten questions of the same difficulty, and it especially should not be ten hard ones.

The shape that works: two that nearly everyone gets, six that split the room, two that only one or two tables will manage. The easy openers matter more than they look: a table that gets the first two right is invested in the round; a table that gets the first two wrong has written it off.

Five hard questions in a row is not a challenging round. It is a round where every table scores two and the standings do not move, which is the same as not having run it.

In a multiple-choice round the wrong options are half the work and most people treat them as filler.

Every wrong option should be one a reasonable person might pick. Three obviously absurd options and one real one is not a question, it is a free point, and a table that spots the pattern stops reading the options at all.

Keep them the same shape, same length, same register, same level of specificity. The most common giveaway in an amateur quiz is that the correct answer is noticeably longer and more precise than the other three.

Avoid "all of the above" and "none of the above". They are a different puzzle from the one you meant to set.

Nobody minds a hard question. Everybody minds a question with two defensible answers, because the argument lands on you and there is no good outcome.

Watch for: questions whose answer depends on a date that has passed, superlatives that change ("the tallest", "the best-selling"), questions where the common answer and the technically correct answer differ, and anything phrased as "the first" without saying first in what.

The test is simple. Read the question and try to argue for a different answer. If you can manage it in under ten seconds, so can a table of four with a phone and a grievance.

The most common failure in a home-written pack is not a hard question, it is a wrong one, usually a fact that was true when it was learned and has since changed.

Anything with a number in it, anything about a record, anything about who currently holds a position: check it the week you run it, not the week you wrote it.

Two independent sources. One source repeated by forty websites is one source.

A question is not hard or easy in the abstract, only relative to the people answering it. A round that works in a student union will die in a members' club and the reverse is just as true.

Spread the decades deliberately. A music round that is entirely nineties indie excludes half a mixed room, and the fix is not making it easier, it is making it broader.

And write some local questions. Questions about the town, the pub, the road outside are the ones people talk about afterwards, they cannot be looked up quickly, and no ready-made pack can ever contain them.

Writing a whole quiz from scratch every week is two to three hours, and it is the single most common reason quiz nights stop. Almost nobody sustains it past six months.

The sustainable pattern is a mixture: ready-made rounds for most of the night and one round a week of your own, usually the local one. That is twenty minutes rather than three hours, and it is the round the regulars care about anyway.

Keep everything you write. A local round from January is perfectly good again in September, and a library you built over a year is worth more than any pack you can buy.