Writing Your Own Trivia

If you are a quiz addict, then you like to test your own knowledge on a specific subject. Taking quizzes and trivia is a great way to learn new things as well as to test your knowledge in something you already know about.

However, you might be surprised to know that the most challenging way to test your knowledge is to write your own trivia.

How to Begin Writing Your Own Trivia

Think of a topic that you are more drawn to when taking trivia. From there, expand on that category to something more specific, something you consider yourself a particular expert in.

For example, if you are a fan of “TV & Movies” quizzes, then you should focus on that category. Out of that, choose a particular topic that you feel confident enough in to provide challenging trivia, considering that others who take this trivia will also consider themselves experts.

Coming Up With Questions

Ideally, you should have 15 to 20 challenging questions in your trivia quiz. Each question should be unique, and difficult. As a self titled expert in this topic, you may think it will be easy but here in lies the challenge that you are writing a trivia for: to find out just how knowledgeable you really are in that field. Sure, you may know plenty, but how much do you know that other self titled experts would be stumped over?

For example, you may think that you are an expert in the television show Friends, and attempt to write a quiz about that. Can you honestly come up with 20 questions that will stump other Friends fans… without doing any research?

(If you have a hard time, it’s okay to do a little research. However, this will cost you all pride in being a “know it all” of that topic.)

When I started writing quizzes my self; I discovered how hard it was to be creative all the time and constantly come up with new exciting questions. That is why I have started to use a questions database from time to time - to help me get started and come up with variety of questions to some quizzes.

There are several sources on the Internet today and I have tried several of them; but I have found the quiz packs from Chance to learn the best and cheapest way to get started. I still need to improve and elaborate the questions, but they are a great source of inspiration - I can recommend that you try them if you want some inspiration too - you can get them here: Quiz questions

The Fun Part: Coming Up With Possible Answers

Ideally, a good trivia is both challenging and entertaining. Following this rule, the right answer should not be obvious. Coming up with answers for your trivia is fun if you can put a little creativity into it. There should be 4 possible answers: 1 absurdly funny answer (that is obviously wrong; or is it?) and 3 really good answers, all of which could be right.

Bonus points if you can alter your trivia question so that the “joke” answer is actually the correct answer.

For example: Can you guess at the correct answer to the following trivia question?

In the first episode of Friends, what was Rachel wearing?

(A) Nothing

(B) A scuba outfit

(C) A wedding dress

(D) A cheerleader’s outfit

Promoting Your Quiz

Out of curiosity, you want to know how challenging your quiz actually is. You want others to take your quiz, share their scores, and possibly even leave feedback. The best way to do this is to seek out other self titled experts in the topic of your quiz and invite them, through bulletin and forum posts or even email invites, to take your quiz.

Be careful not to spam anybody with an invite, and to only invite quiz fans who would be interested in your quiz. In the example used of a Friends TV Show trivia, the best place to promote this quiz would not be a general “TV Show” forum, but a more specific “Friends Fans” forum.

Only then can you find out just how smart you really are…

And by the way... if you had trouble answering the question above, you may take the Friends quiz to find out