Chekhov’s Mistess

Can a Group Write a Novel Together? Ask A Million Penguins

On the heels of my recent post about Wikinomics and literacy, Penguin Uk, whose blog I think is innovative for a publisher, has just announced their “A Million Penguins“ project. The idea is to create a novel with a community of writers over six weeks, all collaborating on a wiki. Using creative writing students from De Montfort University to seed the project, it appears that anyone can participate.

What’s interesting about the wiki format is that writers don’t just add to the previous person’s work, but they can also edit whatever has come before them or even delete it. Penguin offers the following warning for potential participants:

“if you are not happy to have your contributions edited, altered or removed by other contributors, think carefully before signing up.”

It’s a neat idea, and although not the first in collaborative or online fiction, it may be as far as I can tell, the first wikified novel.

I wonder if the results will come anything close to “Art.” Besides the six week time limitation, one person’s interpretation of the nuances of character or other story elements are most certainly not another’s. I do think it’s an interesting lesson in interpretation, though. As each writer applies his or her layer of meaning to a story, the original morphs into something less or different than collective because it’s not any one person’s idea, nor the group’s as a whole, like so many quilt patches. The telephone game also comes to mind where a message is verbally passed from one person to another until finally returning to its author in some form quite a bit different than the original due to cumulative misinterpretations along the way.

Penguin will have an editor commenting/suggesting changes along the way, which in itself is interesting and out of the normal time-frame reference of novel writing (said editor also warns that your contributions, no matter how brilliant, are not the path to getting publshed at Penguin).

I think too that collaboration goes against the creative impulse. The best writers put something of themselves into their work and to have that wiped away at (someone else’s) will is psychically damaging to the ego. I imagine great fights breaking out in the history section (where each change to a wiki is listed).

Wikis are typically used to harness collective knowledge, intelligence, and emendation in real time. It’s that “real time” element that separates them from print and perhaps what makes the difference here. The “Art” in a wiki novel may not be reading it in its final form, but reading it in real time as changes are made, watching the story and characters evolve non-linearly. So, if you’re going to read this novel, best to start now.

comments

Given how much fire writing workshops come under for the work-by-committee effect they sometimes have, this seems to be the kind of outer edge of that concept: not just taking feedback but actively editing and being edited en masse. Will it resemble a novel? Or a camel?

    – Robert (02/11  at  03:57 PM)

Well it seems to me that novel itself is quite poor - I’m enjoying the editor’s blog more than the novel/wiki - how’s that for meta

http://www.amillionpenguins.com/blog/

    – Bud Parr (02/12  at  10:47 AM)

So meta. So hyper. It must be 2.0!

Anyway, noble experiment.

    – Robert (02/12  at  12:09 PM)

I think the editing team at Penguin has their work cut out for them; it’s difficult to see how all these strands will form a cohesive work.

    – Christine (02/12  at  05:56 PM)

I’m really fascinated by collaborative work and everything it means for the role of authorship. I tend to agree with you that the best writers put something of themselves into their work, which makes the work as great as it is. I also feel like doing collaborative work neglects a fundamental purpose of writing--to communicate between two actual people--the writer and the reader. The words on the page are intrinsically connected to a living, breathing person. When work is collaborative and the human being/authorship is stripped away, I honestly get a little creeped out.

However, I can’t help but also see something worthwhile in the collaborative stuff, like this wiki book you’re talking about. Interesting things can be generated that no one person ever could have done alone. Ideas are spawned, and while they do not eminate from one individual mind, they can still impact a reader perhaps the same as if they had come from just one author.

This post-modern sort of fragmentation and loss of whole-personhood is a little emptying and creepy, but I’m still curious to see what sort of monsters it might create! They might be good monsters!

    – Julia (03/24  at  10:14 PM)

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: February 02, 2007
• Filed Under:
  Blogging & Social Media

Tags: Wiki

• Comments:5
• Links to this Post: Technorati

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