Massive wiki novel

The wonderful Penguin UK and DeMontfort University have teamed up to create a massive wiki novel project. For the month of Feb (and beyond hopefully), anyone (including spammers you darn…!) can co-write a novel on a wiki. Here is their goal:

Can a collective create a believable fictional voice? How does a plot find any sort of coherent trajectory when different people have a different idea about how a story should end – or even begin? And, perhaps most importantly, can writers really leave their egos at the door? Typically, a writer will acknowledge in print the efforts of their book’s editor, copy editor and agent, since they each will have read the work in draft form. But such acknowledgments regularly include a disclaimer along these lines : “Any errors that remain are, of course, my own”. So the majority of published writers depend on collaboration, but only up to a point. After all, there is usually a single name on the jacket of a novel.

So is the novel immune from being swept up into the fashion for collaborative activity? Well, this is what we are going to try and discover with A Million Penguins, a collaborative, wiki-based creative writing exercise. We should go into this with the best spirit of scientific endeavour – the experiment is going live, the lab is under construction, the subjects are out there. And the results? We’ll see in a couple of months.

Check out aMillionPenguins.

2 thoughts on “Massive wiki novel

  1. been part of it for a while …it is a fascinating experiment….some amazing writing appears and then is gone, new chapters emerge only to see others cut down….the really interesting part is seeing all the different versions emerging of a “novel” so it is totally playing with the semiotics and expectation of ” a book” and as chaotic as it is, there is a wide open feel that is fresh…the free press project a few months ago was amazing too as they made online and print books out of all kinds of writing done under creative commons license and then actually guerilla put them on shelves..! brilliant…

  2. It is fascinating! I knew about it at the beginning (I chat with Jeremy E. in Second Life!), but haven’t had the time to really check it out. I’m getting into now though — seems the conversation about it amazing too. I so look forward to some essays or papers on the experiment. Good to see you Jeremy!

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