A million penguins

Came across an interesting post on if:book about A Million Penguins, which is Penguin’s attempt to write a novel collaboratively through a wiki.

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. (From the about page.)

While I suspect strongly that it’s going to end up as a mess (though the understory will be quite interesting, as Ben Vershbow on if:book points out), I am very interested to see what happens. It’s about time somebody did this. :)

Wow, the story really is just a bunch of nonsense. I think this sort of idea could work, but only if you limit the number of participants. Maybe the Neo-Inklings should try this?

I’m still dubious — have you ever heard of childbirth by committee? — but it’s certainly something to explore, if only to see what really does happen, rather than merely theorizing about it. I can’t think of any novels I’ve read where there were more than two authors, but screenplays often have upwards of eight or nine authors (though not at the same time). I can see a sequential method like that working (perhaps not smoothly, but working), whereas a concurrent method would be chaotic, increasing exponentially with each new participant. If you like chaotic, postpostmodern novels, great. I don’t. :) (And the “you” here is general, by the way.)