#54. Writer’s Contract (Tuesday, July 11, 2006)

What was your best day…of finding out that somebody was willing to pay you for doing something you enjoyed?

I believe it was Stephen King that once said that to call yourself a writer, you had to do three things: (1) write something; (2) get paid for it¹; and (3) buy dinner with that money. In deference to Mr. King, I suppose I officially became a writer at the bright young age of fifteen.

Okay, fine. All I did was write trivia questions for National Academic Quiz Tournaments (NAQT), i.e. the organization that manages quizbowl in the U.S., for $1.50 apiece. But still.

Recall from #118 that my high school trivia team became the first ever team from Canada to qualify for U.S. Nationals in Chicago. I wasn’t on the main team that year so didn’t go, but the whole thing piqued my interest, so one day I looked under “Jobs” on NAQT’s website and found out I could be a contract question writer for them: all I had to do was send them a sample of ten questions, and if they were good enough, I would be sent a contract to sign and I’d be ready to go.

So I wrote my sample questions and sent them over. I wasn’t expecting too much: this was a legitimate job at an American institution, after all. But it was fun to give it a shot.

And on this Tuesday afternoon, I came home to see that the director of NAQT had gotten back to me with some comments on the questions I had submitted – but said I would be fine to take on as a writer. Holy shit!

With that one e-mail, I had just skipped past like three or four levels. From a player not good enough to play in a NAQT tournament (and from a country that didn’t play NAQT), to a certified employee of the NAQT organization itself. Unfathomable.

So I got the contract signed and mailed. I got my first ever Gmail invite (back when you needed invites), so I could access the internal question database. And for the next two years, I was a casual employee for NAQT. (Under the stipulation, of course, that I inform NAQT about any tournaments that I was planning to participate in – so they could exclude my questions from it.)

All as a teenager still in high school. Thinking back, that was by far the most impressive instance of my initiative from all of those years, and is probably still being underrated.

At the time there were about 80 or so writers in total, mostly players at the college level, and a few other former quizbowl players – one of whom was Ken Jennings (BYU) of Jeopardy fame, just two years after his generational 74-game win streak. He edited the literature and mythology sections, so through his comments and edits I did get to interact with him a bit. Which obviously became a highlight of my high school years.

Of course, you did this job not for the money, but because you loved quizbowl and the institution of trivia. I don’t think I even cashed all the checks. But to say that I was a writer by profession for the first time was pretty damn cool.

Which, unfortunately, wasn’t the case for that first novel I wrote in seventh grade (#124).