“Have you never made sense of something after the event?”

Jim was getting exasperated again.

George was peering too intently at the text.

“Just leave it!” Jim man barked at him. “I know what you are thinking. No need to say it. Is it only good if it makes linear sense? If I put it in the right order, would that make you comfortable? Never mind the kick’ you get when a connection dawns on you - out of sequence. Get it?”George indicated he didn’t.

“Well, then. I am not going to explain. Watch!”

So begins the twelfth subsection, entitled Les Reflections Dans L’Oeil d’un Chien: Or, How I learnt French to Please My Daddy (wtf?), of the second main section of the wiki-novel. For those of you who haven’t mastered its structure, the novel is broken down into seven discrete sections, plus one additional section that incorporates the more bizarre elements of this collaborative project (the ‘Banana version‘, the ‘Choose Your Own Adventure version‘, etc). Having said that, it seems unfair to single out one part of the book that’s weirder than the others. But you can see for yourself what I mean.

The quote with which I’ve begun seems apposite because it captures two aspects of the book that have really stood out: a) the question of linearity b) the way that the wiki-novel seems so often to be about the wiki-novel. You could justifiably call much of it a meta-narrative.

I know I said this in one of my earlier posts but the whole thing about us thinking it would be a linear book and everyone else telling us that it wouldn’t be, then us secretly getting all high and mighty about it, then realizing we were wrong, is actually pretty important. In fact, what was most successful about this project was its use of the wiki format as a space for a jointly authored text, though the writing isn’t half bad in places. When Jeremy first told me about what he had in mind, I was like, ‘OK, but I don’t understand what you’re talking about. You need to find someone smarter.’ And to be completely honest I don’t think I really understood what the project was about until about half way through, and even then - or now, for that matter - I may not completely get it.

The book, which is now fossilized, is unlike anything I’ve read before. The original first sentence - “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day” - is, as some of you will doubtless have recognized, the opening sentence of Jane Eyre. I suggested it (and got my way) because it was vague, un-prescriptive, and carried some serious cultural weight. I wonder whether this was at some level the reason for Carlo’s (remember him?) disability. I’m trying to remember off-hand if he was depressed and disabled or both, but in any case there was, for poor Carlo, no possibility of taking a walk that day.

There are countless examples in literature of books in which the sum of the parts is greater than the whole. The wiki-novel is one such case (though naturally I’m a bit nervous about making any claims for its being literature, at least in the whole mind of Europe sense of the word). There are classic themes here: love, death, sex, loneliness, friendship, animosity, creativity, social justice, violence and so on. I don’t think any of these are explored in much depth, but then that’s not exactly what you’d expect from a book like this. I’d like to say that I expected range without substance, but I’d be lying: I didn’t know and couldn’t guess what people would write. Now it seems obvious. When 1500 people set out to write a work of fiction, bringing 1500 people’s worth of experience, perspective, grievances and proclivities this project was never going to be anything if not multitudinous, international and epic.

I’d like to think that the wiki-novel in the end was self-referential rather than solipsistic. There are some great jokes (or ‘comic moments’ may be a better way of putting it) in it about the process itself, which again brings us back to that old chestnut: the triumph of form over content. And this, I guess, is what people will say in the end: that it was an interesting experiment, shame about the writing. They will be neither right nor wrong. No, a community probably can’t write a novel, but I don’t think the question (which we posed, I concede) is of much use to anyone, especially since the words ‘community’ and ‘novel’ don’t cut much ice in a situation like this (PS. See Steven Poole’s book Unspeak published last year if you want to see that annoying word, community,’ ripped to shreds.). Speaking of lessons not learned: the wiki-novel did not teach us either that a bunch of hacks with computers can all go write something on the same website. No, what’s been shown is that a bunch of strangers with both nothing to lose and nothing to gain worked toward a nebulous common goal. I guess its she sheer benevolence on display that amazed me most. Well done to all of you. Thanks for writing.

Jon Elek

…For the pretentiousness of my last post. I was reading it over and it’s pretty much thinly veiled claptrap. Martin Amis once said (I’m paraphrasing) that the critic must proceed by quotation, and this I did not do - probably because I couldn’t. I could erase it now but it’s kind of like whatever, so I concocted theory I don’t agree with anymore, it’s not the end of the world. I do, though, still think that there was/is a cartoonish quality to the novel.

Anyway, I’m going to spend some time reading through the thing and collecting my thoughts on it. There’s a lot of disarray right now at Penguin HQ, because we’re about to become the unofficial publishers of East London when we move offices to Brick Lane on the weekend. But this is of limited interest to you, my millionkindofpublishedwriters. Commentary to follow.

Jon

‘The man was clearly mad! No rules? It would never work! You may as well get penguins to write a novel!‘ - from the wikinovel

So we’ve come to the end of the road and, thanks to all of you the journey has been the reward. This has been an amazing project to work on and that is because of your efforts and contributions.

Jon is going to blog about the editorial content of the wikinovel; my reading of the novel has, I’m afraid, been rather sporadic, since I’ve spent much of the last five weeks refreshing the recent changes page to see what has been added, altered and deleted in a forlorn attempt to stay on top of things. But a fifteen hour plane flight on Friday will enable me, I hope, to read it in a single sitting, as I would read a traditional novel, and I will endeavour to add some further thoughts to this blog after this.

I’ve also been monitoring the stats and wanted to share some with you now. Nearly 1500 of you have contributed to the writing and editing of A Million Penguins, contributing over 11,000 edits making this, in the words of Penguin’s Chief Executive, ‘not the most read, but possibly the most written novel in history‘. 75000 people have visited the site and there have been more than 280,000 page views.

So what of the experiment - can a collective really write a novel? I guess the answer has to be a qualified maybe. Watching the recent changes and the discussion pages and the user talk pages gives me hope - it is clear that some of you have really worked well together, discussed each others contributions and have even made plans to collaborate further in the future which is really encouraging. But clearly opening this experiment up to ‘the whole world’ caused problems - we had vandals, pornographers, spammers and any number of people who had such differing ideas about what would make a good novel that a real sense of cohesiveness was always going to be hard to achieve.

As the project evolved I think I stopped thinking about it as a literary experiment and started thinking about it more as a social experiment, and from this point of view *slips lab coat on, adjusts safety specs* my, what a great bunch of subjects you have been! The department of Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University are going to employ a researcher to write a paper on the project later in the year and boy, will he or she have some great material to work from.

So what happens now? We’re actively looking at how we can convert the 1030 pages of the wikinovel into an ebook and as soon as we work it out, we’ll let you know here and also at the Penguin Blog. We’ve also learnt a lot about wikis and about communities from this project and I hope and expect that we will see a great many more ’social’ experiments from Penguin in the future and also that we will use wikis again as a way of encouraging discussions and conversations around particular books, authors or topics.

One last thought for now - in the beginning we had Carlo, and Inu, and Mikael, then Big Tony appeared then Big Bababooey Benjy (and variants thereof) and then the whales appeared and then Jim and, well, you can see for yourselves here. This project has been exhilarating, controversial, frustrating, engaging, funny, touching and at times it has nearly driven me bananas. But one thing it has never been is boring and everyone who has contributed a character, a plotline, changed a spelling, added an apostrophe, blogged about it or even just read it can take great credit for that.

From all of us to all of you - a million thanks.

Jeremy@Penguin

Yes - you heard right - we’ll be battening down the hatches on Wednesday, so get those last-minute edits in sooner rather than later. We’ve also closed most of the posts on this blog for comments (the spam was becoming unbearable) but we’ve left open the last few so that you can tell us how it is going and continue the really positive and interesting conversations you have all been having. We’ll post more on the blog over the next few days, but if you want to have a look at some of the things people have been saying about this project, here are a couple of useful links here, here and here…

jeremy@penguin

I don’t propose a unifying theory as such, but I’ve found it remarkable that the dominant tone of the wikinovel so far has been comic. Not that I don’t think it’s a good thing, I’m all for humour. It’s just surprising, is all. But what kind of humour is it? My view is that it’s a Menippean satire penned in the age of The Simpsons. The idea of Menippean satire (as opposed to, say, Horation or Juvenalian satire) is that the narrative is broken up, or fragmentary, and the (typically) acerbic humour fires out in a scattershot fashion. And what is the wikinovel if not scattershot and fragmentary?

But even more important than the swotty lit-crit term I’ve used is the bit about it being inspired by The Simpsons. In 1910, Virgina Woolf once overstated, having been an exhibition of Impressionist paintings in London, thus: “human nature changed”. That’s a pretty outrageous thing to think, let alone write in print, but something similar, I reckon, could be said that wonderful animated television show. The Simpsons has shaped how people are funny - both publically and privately; it has been a profound influence on a whole generation’s sense of humour, their understanding of what is funny and why. Jokes from The Simpsons not only constitute an almost self contained language of their own, they are responsible for the wide popularity of a kind of detached, ironic whimsy in contemporary culture. This can be seen, I would argue, in the wikinovel.

This might have to do with the cartoonish quality of the novel itself. Because it’s so discontinuous,moving from line to line or section to section with no real sense of accumulation, it can begin to look self-parodying, a fact which you, amillionwiseguys, have chosen to exploit. And in places it is very, very funny.

And, from an editorial point of view, it is getting much better. It may be a giant wall of graffiti (someone else’s metaphor) but some of it is rather good.

We’re closing in on the end of the project - what will happen in the next week? It would be great to be really proud of this at some level. I think most of us are delighted by the response to the wikinovel, but imagine if amilliongroenings produced a piece of work that had some real merit to it. So whoever’s been hanging on to their best material - now’s the time to set it free…

Jon

Just a quick word from your unwinsome editor, who’s done another bout of transatlantic travel this weekend. The upshot is that I concocted a theory about the wikinovel on the plane; but I haven’t slept in a couple of days and explaining my theory demands concentration. More soon, mes amis.

Phew - what a rollercoaster it has been. A Million Penguins has been running for three weeks now and we’ve had just under a quarter of a million page views and more than 9000 edits. Now I’m here to tell you wikinovelistas that we’ve got a little less than two weeks to go and to suggest that now is the time to begin tie-ing up loose ends, spellchecking, getting your links in order and generally winding up. We’ll be locking everything down for good on Wednesday the 7th March and after this point no further changes will be possible, so perhaps have a good read of everything now and let’s work out how we prove the doubters and naysayers wrong.

Jeremy@Penguin

PS we’re looking at ways of how we can preserve the wikinovel as an ebook but clearly need a format that keeps all links attached. If anyone has any bright ideas of how we can do this, or knows of any useful software tools, make sure you let us know.

So, backstage conversation has turned to the bananapolisation of A Million Penguins and what, if anything, we should do about it. Is our banana obsessed contributor a mere vandal, a warped genius, some sort of whacky perfomance artist or simply a very naughty boy (or girl)? Should we ban him/her (permanently, or just for a few days?) or celebrate the infusion of fruity fun into this project? Basically does this gag have apeel, or have you all had a skinfull of bananaman’s monkeying about? So in the spirit of openness with which (we hope) we have approached every aspect of this project we ask you, contributors and readers, to suggest a route forward.

jeremy@penguin

There are two reasons for the title of this post. The first has to do with why my weekly blog entry is late: your tireless editor has been doing some serious intercontinental travel in the past couple of days and now finds himself in an intensely snowy part of the world - at, no less, the snowiest time of the year. It’s also freezing (-18 c with wind-chill), so I’m keeping myself sane by drinking tea by the log fire and snuggling up with my laptop reading amillionpenguins.

I don’t know how much you know about snow, but it’s said that no two snowflakes are alike. The same, no doubt, can be said about people - and perhaps (judging from the randomness of the prose) in particular you writers of the wikinovel. I was duly dressed down by a couple of well intentioned critics last week for slagging off the lack of plot in the text to date. And while I thought at first that they were just being a bit plaintive, I know see how right they were - and how right, moreover, people were to suggest that traditional ideas of “plot” weren’t wholly useful when it came a project like this. Jeremy, Penguin’s resident Oppenheimer (obviously this experiment is similar in many ways to the Manhattan project), and I were told at one point in Leicester that we were thinking in too linear terms about the possibilities of wikifiction. On our journey back to the Strand (i.e. Los Alamos) we kind of dismissed this as wishful avant-gardism.

But, now that we’re half way in, I’d say that they were right and we were…well, wrong. Do not attempt to read this as a traditional novel. Swim around in it a little, see what you like, read until you get bored. I find I can read in about 10 minute stints, which I reckon is pretty good considering what it’s like. But then again, I can’t sit down and read a lot of well known experimental writing for much more than that anyway.

So forget what I said before. Scribble away my millionritalincases, because it’s very cold and I need cheering up.

Jon

So we’re 10 days into the wikinovel experiment and now that things have quietened down, for the time being at least, there is an opportunity to take a breath and see what we’ve learned, if anything, so far.
Let’s kick off with some statistics - since we launched on February 1st, 60,000 individuals have visited the wiki and more than 1200 have created an account. At launch there was a single line on the page - ‘There was no possibility of taking a walk that day’ and since then there have been 600 pages created and more than 7000 edits.
And what is on these pages? Well, the story so far is more like three/four or five stories with no master narrative yet emerging. Penguin editor Jon has called for wiki-ists (wikitas? wikitors?) to take hold of the novel and pull a plot together, but it is already clear that many are reveling in the creative anarchy that the site provides. But here and there, amidst the chaos there are little islands of calm - a chapter made entirely of links, a choose your own adventure story that seems to be going places, and lots more, hidden from the turbulence of the front page.

The reaction to this project has been incredible, with a huge deal of interest from all over the world. Some blogs have questioned our sanity, others have coherently critiqued the entire premis of amillionpenguins, and others have sagely commented that the discussion pages and list of edits are as interesting, if not more so, than the novels themselves. Fay Weldon called it ‘writing without responsibility’ and perhaps most wonderfully, the project has inspired poetry.

We’re only a third of the way through this project, but already we have seen some great things written (and deleted), enough vandalism to keep us going for the rest of the project thank you very much, a lot of nonsense, some fascinating conversations taking place about writing and about collaboration and some real thought and energy being put into answering the question of whether a community can write a novel.

I’ve started thinking of the site as a giant, ever-expanding sandbox - anyone can build there, but there is always the possibility of getting your sandcastle kicked over or incorporated into someone else’s project. Whether one huge, ornate and architecturally coherent sandcastle will ever take shape I don’t know, but there are some fine and interesting smaller constructions going on,

There’s still a few weeks to go, so there’s still time to make your mark on A Million Penguins - or just have a read and let us know what you think here, there or somewhere else…

jeremy