Hi,

My name is Jon and I work at Penguin’s Viking imprint. I’m going to be the editor on this project, meaning that I will pay close attention to how the novel is developing with particular attention paid to the plot, characters, dialogue and prose style. I am not going to do any actual editing to the text - because since all of you will have the capacity to edit that’s partly your job - but I will provide a kind of running commentary on the story, suggesting changes, revisions and possible directions it could take.

In our dusty corner of the menacing Penguin skyscraper in London’s West End (which, if you’re not au fait with London geography, means central London), not a day goes by without at least a couple dozen unsolicited manuscripts turning up in the post. In the main these don’t get read, since we, like most publishing houses, tend to acquire books from literary agents. What’s more, we take on only a tiny fraction of books which come from said agents leaving one to conclude that getting published is a rather difficult business. One role that publishers entrust to agents is that of a filter, since - and in no way do I want to sound precious here (but it doesn’t mean it’s not true) - there are a lot more people writing books than are writing publishable books.

I’m saying this because I guess I want to get something out of the way: the wikinovel experiment is not a place to prove to Penguin we should publish your book. I hope very much that the project shows evidence at some level of brilliance, but that this will stem from the collaborative nature of what you’re doing rather than the individual contibutions. I would expect that some bits will be stronger than others, since naturally there will be all sorts of people, with varying degrees of talent, getting involved.

If you’re thinking of contributing to the wikinovel, please be prepared to put in a bit of time familiarizing yourself with what’s already up on the screen. This means getting to grips with things like its genre, context, characterization, narrative development and tone. In an ideal world we could throw in a sense of plausibility, balance and humour. That’s asking a lot, and in truth I’ll be happy so long as it manages to avoid becoming some sort of robotic-zombie-assassins-against-African-ninjas-in-space-narrated-by-a-Papal-Tiara type of thing. Or whatever.

And when it’s all over maybe we can go for a nice long lunch.

Jon

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The copy currently on the page is too long. Here is a proposed rewrite;

A Million Penguins is an experiment in creative writing and community. Anyone can join in. Anyone can write. Anyone can edit. Let’s see if the crowds are not only wise, but artistic. Or will too many cooks spoil the broth?

If you want to take part, please take a moment to read the technical and ethical guidelines shown on the left. We will ask you to register to participate, and to look at the terms and conditions before you join in. But the most important thing we ask is that if you are not happy to have your contributions edited, altered or removed by other contributors, think carefully before signing up.

You can follow the progress of the wikinovel here or at the wikinovel blog where a Penguin editor will be writing regular reading reports on the work in progress.

Can a million penguins sitting at a million keyboards together write a novel? Let’s find out.

I’ve added a link to the sidebar of the blog today - it’s an article by Zadie Smith on writing. I’d like to have some links to useful creative writing articles and sites on the actual wiki - so if you know of anything useful - mail me the links and I’ll start collecting them on the blog. Anything about plot construction, characterisation, dialogue would, I think, be useful.

Also, if anyone can think of any useful blogs or communities we ought to contact to alert them to this project - let me know. I have a few up my sleeve already, but the more, the merrier.

Jeremy

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 going live, the lab is under construction, the subjects are out there. And the results? We’ll see in a couple of months.

Jeremy