So, you’ve attended a couple of tournaments and found a lovely team that’s just starting to gel. They’ve universally agreed that you’re the literature player, which is all fine by you - you love books! Only one problem - you keep getting beaten to the buzz on Orhan Pamuk novels you’ve never heard of.
It’s intimidating to turn up to the big tournaments and find yourself overwhelmed with names, events, theories and artworks that everyone else seems to have in their pocket. The secret is that everyone’s first quizbowl tournaments feel like that - including the people outbuzzing you. Getting that good at quizbowl can seem like an insurmountable mountain (it doesn’t help that people often conflate “being really clever” with “knowing the names of lots of books and historical figures”). But the truth is very prosaic - it really just takes practice and a bit of elbow grease.
Needless to say, I am not one to advise on how to get better at quizbowl, given I cruise by in tournaments with an occasional buzz on a famous king with a Civilization V mod that I like, or an artwork that, while working at the Tate Modern, I once had to stop someone from leaning on while texting someone. Three Dancers by Pablo Picasso, by the way. That actually happened.
Instead a few of UKQB’s more experienced quizzers have weighed in to give advice on getting better at their specific disciplines. Despite his general quiz performance indicating a specialist subject of “anything you like, really”, Ben Russell Jones (formerly of Edinburgh) has written our first column on how to improve at literature quizzing. Take it away, Ben
Introduction
So, you’re interested in literature? Fantastic! Personally, literature was always the category I liked the most because I always found it the most accessible. Hear something lit-related that sounds cool? You can go and read about it - simple.
What I’m aiming to do in this section is to give you an overview on what it is to be a literature player, and how you can get better. I’ve been a literature-focused quizbowler for the last five years of my student career, and hopefully I can pass along some tips that will help you enjoy it as much as I did.
I’m going to start this by being a little bit self-centred - sorry. You can skip ahead if you’d like, but I think it might help some of you to learn how I got into reading.
Before I came to university, I was not a reader. I spent far too much time online looking at meaningless information, wasting my time. This changed during my last year of comprehensive (secondary) school. I managed to find myself on the Wikipedia page for dystopian literature. I’d heard of Nineteen Eighty-Four previously (perhaps from the occasional glimpse of Room 101 on TV), but never read it. Looking a little bit deeper, I came across The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. After a quick summary of the plot, I actually felt the urge to read it. The next day, I asked my English teacher, who was able to lend me a copy, along with other, similar books, like Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, or even Nineteen Eighty-Four, if I fancied it. Let’s just say that the claustrophobia, the darkness, and the politically-charged nature of The Handmaid’s Tale hooked me completely.
I took my teacher up on her offer. Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon came and went, as did Alan Moore’s comic V for Vendetta, which I somehow managed to procure from the school library. I was mainly interested in fiction of the dystopian kind; perhaps due to a fascination with video games that played with similar themes. However, this was a real ‘foot in the door’ moment for me; today I read almost every genre of fiction: classic literature, sci-fi, romance, comic fiction, et cetera. Finding that interesting ‘spark’ was what started such a journey off, and if that spark hasn’t arrived for you, then I’m very happy to try and light it.
Getting Started
For those of you lit lovers who are just starting to play QB, here are two easy tips.
The most crucial thing to keep in mind is that you will not know everything; so don’t be upset at not knowing something. Instead, enjoy learning about the things you find interesting while playing - akin to taking an ‘awe walk’ around your local area. If you hear something in a question that interests you, make a note of it (mental or physical), and look it up later. Perhaps hearing about the hilariously named Mr. Barbecue-Smith will make you want to read some Aldous Huxley, or maybe the darker tones in Toni Morrison’s Beloved will grab you. Enjoyment is what we seek in quizbowl, so enjoy learning about the things you enjoy for starters.
Next, you just need to play a lot, and, most importantly, you need to enjoy playing. The chess player Ben Finegold once summarised his chess education by claiming that as a child, he didn’t want to necessarily be the best in the world, but thoroughly enjoyed the process of actually playing chess tournaments. Obviously, he liked playing, but he also liked the gimmicks that went along with playing chess: marking notation, pressing the clock, et cetera. I think this advice applies almost perfectly to quizbowl. For a beginner, there is no better tip to improve at quizbowl other than to play quizbowl. Go to practice. Play tournaments. Play questions on QBReader. Enjoy pressing the buzzer. To get better at quizzes, doing quizzes is critical. Through this, you’ll learn what topics you find interesting and you can go and read more about them. Yet if you get beaten to your favourite topic in a game, don’t be discouraged, but pay attention to what’s being buzzed on; you’ll learn a lot.
Moving to Higher Levels
OK. So you want to get better. Good for you! You’ll have to put more effort in. Start paying more attention. Take notes on the things that keep cropping up in those literature questions and commit them to mind so you can buzz on them next time. Be aware of the incline in difficulty between tournaments; harder tournaments are going to ask about more obscure works, but this is only a good excuse for you to read more of them!
You should also keep in mind that a fact that comes up in one quizbowl tournament can be phrased in a very different manner in another. Let’s see how this works with a novel like Pride and Prejudice. You may hear in one question that the protagonist, Elizabeth Bennet, undertakes a muddy walk of a few miles to see her sister Jane, who is unwell. If you were to play a tournament and hear something along the lines of “a member of this family is chastised for having trudged through six inches of mud during a five mile walk” (SMH, 2021), you have to make the connection between the literary fact that you know and the description in the tossup, and answer “Bennet”. This may seem like an obvious thing to bring up, but any given line about a character in a novel isn’t going to be phrased the same way every time: making these connections is key to improving as a literature player and becoming a better quizbowler.
Finally, if you want to start carding, do so at your peril! Carding is the quizbowl term for a common study technique, flashcards, and can be done either with physical cards or, more commonly, an app or computer program. It’s quite boring and will take up a lot of your time, but you will certainly benefit from spaced repetition. I personally used Anki for such repetition, and focused on content that I didn’t know (like Jane Austen, for instance), which helped me to remain stimulated as I was reviewing my notes. If there are facts/clues that crop up in your areas that you just can’t get a grip on, try making a note of them and viewing them again and again on some repetition software like Anki or Mnemosyne, it may help you improve in your area rather rapidly. I must emphasise that this should only be done in the service of fun and enjoyment with quizbowl and not in the service of trying to learn everything.