About the Wikinovel
From PenguinWiki
Crowdsourcing. The Wisdom of the crowds. Social networking. Collaborative enterprise.
The buzz these days is all about the network, the small pieces loosely joined. About how the sum of the parts is greater than the whole. About how working together and joining the dots serves the greater good and benefits our collective endeavours. This is undoubtedly true in many fields. Software is rarely written in a vacuum and indeed the “open source” movement is built on the premise that collaboration is the only way to get bugs spotted and move forward. Scientific research, too, is more often than not a collaborative activity - and peer review is key to checking and honing the development of scientific ideas. However, is the same true in artistic fields? We are used to the romantic notion of the artist or the novelist working alone in an attic room, or in the shed at the bottom of the garden. As James Joyce memorably put it, the artist forges in the “smithy of [his] soul”. Yet many of the most highly regarded television programmes of recent years are written by teams of writers; and the majority of films go through rigorous screen testing exercises (and are often altered as a result) before they reach the paying customer. The painters Holbein and Titian, among any number of their contemporaries, used students to add the detail to their pieces before signing them, a tradition continued to this day by Damien Hirst who openly acknowledges the contribution of his studio team.
But what about the novel? 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 live, the lab is open, the subjects are out there. And the results? We’ll see in a couple of months.
A Million Penguins is sponsored by Penguin Books UK who wish to express their appreciation to the students on the MA in Creative Writing and New Media who have generously offered their time and energy to this project.
