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

It’s widely held that one of the hallmarks of great writing is the ability to bring together things that don’t usually belong together.  And, moreover, to do so in a way that invites contemplation or, ideally, some kind of wider understanding of life, language, society, politics, humanity, relationships, religion etc - a eureka moment, if you like. This is less true of fiction than poetry, but the dexterity and inventiveness with which a writer moves from sentence to sentence or idea to idea is often a measure of his or her talent. As with everything, great risks can bring great rewards; but while the pay off can huge (Finnegans Wake; Midnight’s Children; One Hundred Years of Solitude), the chance of failure is high (discretion forbids exemplifying).  

I see that you, the 6 billion writers of amillionpenguins, have decided to gamble. I, your miserable and long suffering editor, admit to feeling completely at odds with the novel as it stands. In Stalinist Russia they would have considered this a good thing: that the familiar had somehow become very strange indeed. But in this, our stupider age, I find I just can’t get very far. (Note: “stupider age” is platitudinous; I’d much rather be here, despite the snow, than in Stalin’s Russia, which I gather was also rather snowy). 

The main problem I have is that every time I go back to the website it’s changed, a bit like my girlfriend’s mind. And perhaps like that it resists rational enquiry. I’ve found the best way to approach amillionpenguins is to sample it basically at random. I don’t think that this is the place or the time to start handing out medals but I’ve been very impressed by some of the individual contributions. It’s like a whole lot of white noise and then you get something really fantastic - these moments of real clarity or insightfulness or depth. I’ve also noticed that some contributors are exploring the technological possibilities of the wiki format, possibly for my enjoyment (there’s one entry where each word in the paragraph is hyperlinked to its definition, and another where each letter takes you to a quote from a well known martial text (small “m”, not the Roman epigramist, which come to think of it would be wonderful)). So well done you, amillionnabokovs, for getting so gamey on us! 

We’re a week in and the jury is still very much out; in fact, I think they’re off drinking white wine at the Groucho. But keep up the good work, my milliontorturedsouls, and let’s see if we can’t get something resembling a plot up there soon. 

 Yours 

Jon 

Okay - the wiki will be up and running (stumbling? leapfrogging? playing twister?) in about 30mins. We have tried to organise the structure a little to make navigating the wikinovel(s) an easier proposition - you can help this process by fixing any broken links you might find and unifying formatting.

There seem to be (at least) three separate novels being worked on at the moment. On the front page is the beginning of the novel that was on this front page before the break and you can find a link to Novel B here. Links to a rumoured ‘Alternative’ or ‘Real’ story can be found in the discussion pages.

We hope you think this reading break is a sensible idea - do let us know whether we’ve got anything hopelessly confused, or alternatively, get involved and make it work! If you want to get in touch directly you can of course use this blog, the discussion pages and there is even a contact email on the wiki front page - we’d love to hear from you.

I’m off for a soothing cup of chamomile tea - play nicely everyone.

Jeremy@penguin

PS I see Jon scrawling on his monitor with a red marker pen - expect an editorial report soon!

…………………………………………………………………..

Remember that by posting a comment you are agreeing to the website Terms of Use. If you consider any content on this site to be inappropriate, please report it to Penguin Books by emailing reportabuse@penguin.co.uk

Well, this is all quite overwhelming, isn’t it? What a response so far - contributions from all over the world flooding in at a vast rate, almost 100 edits an hour! But this inevitably leads to some problems - keeping up with what is happening on the wikinovel is a challenge too far and, looking at the discussions, it seems that some of you are frustrated with this aspect of the experiment.
We’ve also had periodic bouts of vandalism which are valiantly being tackled by you and also by the students at De Montfort who are circling the wagons and attempting to repel all attacks as fast as they come in.

Jon too is struggling as by the time he has read the novel and written his report, something completely different has appeared on the screen.

So we’ve had the idea of creating a ‘reading window’ where we lock down the wiki for a few hours each day. (I’m thinking 12-4pm GMT) This will enable us to do some housekeeping (restore links, remove pornography (!) and Chinese (!!)), Jon to have a read of a static novel and perhaps you, the community, can also use this time to read the work so far, check in on the discussions and have a think about where the story might be heading. Above all, it will also give us the chance to catch our breath - another five and a half weeks of this might send us over the edge!

So, what do you think? Unless we get any fundamental objections we can have this in place tomorrow.

Jeremy

…………………………………………………………………..

……………………………………………………………………

When we launched this experiment we didn’t anticipate the huge and passionate response. Three days into it we’ve seen thousands of words written and a similar number edited and deleted. Every time I refresh the page something has changed, sometimes a simple spelling correction, the creation of a new character or even the reversion of an entire storyline. We’ve had creativity, obscenity, poetry and vandalism - and we’ve still got weeks to go! I dare not sleep!

So we’re already learning lots about how people can come together to work on a project like this and I’d encourage everyone to read the main discussion page to see the really interesting conversations people are having about moving forward.

So we now have a dilemma as the creators of the site - do we take a hands off stance and let you, the community sort everything out for yourselves with the freedom and anarchy that that will bring? Or should we try and add some additional structure to this project in the hope that it will improve the experience for many and minimise the frustration caused by reversion wars?

Looking at the discussion some ideas have emerged and we’d be interested to know your thoughts on them.

• Locking chapters and allowing them to be edited one by one.
• Placing each chapter on a separate page to prevent reversion of entire story.
• Encouraging people to create new stories on new pages so that multiple stories can coexist without replacing individual stories.

I am sure there are other ideas out there - please do add them below and we shall try and act on a consensus view. Of course, if you want us to keep our sticky beaks out of it, then let us know that as well.

Jeremy

PS A big thanks to everyone for your participation so far - it is hugely exciting to watch this unfold!