News

For some reason, the hunt for the great Internet novel is still on. The hunt, of course, isn't for a book about the Internet; the object here is a book written by the Internet, in the same collaborative spirit that cooked up Wikipedia.

The results thus far aren't promising. But the "wisdom of the crowds" is in these days, and so we watch as one well-meaning website after another tries to make a go of having the mob write fiction. One large attempt recently ended in glorious disarray, but others are still ongoing. Unsurprisingly, the less ambitious they get, the more successful they become.

It was none other than Penguin Books that put its logo to the most high-profile of experiments, a fully collaborative, anything-goes wiki novel, A Million Penguins . The novel was written in the vein of Wikipedia: anybody could jump in and add, delete, or rewrite text at any point. The whole enterprise was wrapped in hopeful talk about "crowdsourcing," though the project's leaders seem to have had a pretty good idea of what was coming.

"Can a collective create a believable fictional voice?" Penguin asked when it launched the project. "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?"

The answers turned out to be "no" and "it doesn't." The months-long writing effort, which involved the combined work of hundreds, ended in March. The result was less a novel than a chaotic, never-ending string of vignettes about writers, police, walruses and the nature of collaborative fiction. French post-structuralists get dragged in at points. It's that kind of story.

By all evidence, the endeavour was undertaken in an open and community-minded spirit by Penguin, though it must be pointed out that an experiment like this is a win-win for a publisher. If its wiki-novel had turned out to be readable, the company could claim to have popularized a new creative enterprise. If it demonstrates that the collective cannot do as well as the individual author, as indeed it did, then the failure doesn't reflect badly on the publisher. Penguin is in the authorship business, after all.

So if asking the masses to write a single book proved ill advised, it might be reasonable to apply more structure to the process. To that end, other collaborative-writing sites ask users to pitch in one chapter at a time.

Take Portrayl.com and Glypho.com. Glypho, in particular, tries to massage the writing process by breaking it into discrete chunks. A Glypho story gets started when a user posts a nutshell story idea. From there, other users can pitch in by filling in specific blanks. Users can suggest plot ideas in the special box set aside for that purpose, or flesh out prospective character definitions.

But reducing the creative process to some kind of how-to guide for frustrated writers doesn't seem to help much. A significant number of contributions to these sites haven't got past the first chapter, even though there's no shortage of available first chapters on which to build.

Another approach, then, is to dispense with chapters and simply ask people to write serialized blurbs. That's the idea behind Ficlets.com, a site that does for fiction what Twitter does for blogging. You might know Twitter as a faddish blogging service which mandates extremely short updates from its users, freeing them from the onus of writing a post with a beginning, middle, end or purpose.

Ficlets tries to do the same thing by jettisoning the notion of a chapter, and the structural baggage that goes with it. Each "ficlet" is a blurb of arbitrary length; authors can connect their ficlets to the beginning or end of other ficlets. Most run a few paragraphs, though others are no more than a few sentences each. The site is fun and unpretentious, and it attracts a dozen or so blurbs a day. But once again, most of them are freestanding story fragments rather than additions to previous works.

Maybe that's because few of the starting chapters submitted to these sites are especially compelling. A lot of it is amateur fiction, with its own ineffable fragrance (floral, with a rich dash of adverb). It could also be that collaborative writing is an artificial notion, a novelty act of the creative world. Maybe there's a one-to-one relationship between storyteller and story that makes splitting a narrative between authors an unappealing proposition for writers as well as readers. Don't let post-structuralists tell you otherwise.

Which knocks us down to the lowest rung on the ladder, which, as it happens, is the most entertaining: getting together to make up words. At Verbotomy.com, users play a word-invention game of the sort you'll find in quality publications. Every weekday, artist and programmer James Gang posts an illustrated definition; players compete to invent a word to describe it. Most of the results are puns and most of the puns are terrible, which, being puns, only makes them better.

To wit: A third wheel, invited to stay by a couple despite manifest awkwardness, is a "matecrasher." Emotional frustration at e-mail being returned to sender is "emailaise." Feeling disappointment at a stupid mistake is to be "blunderstruck." Think you can do worse? Step right up.

Quick clicks

LINERIDER

A software toy with a deceptively simple premise: Draw lines on your screen, and a little man will toboggan down them, obeying the laws of physics. Draw a downward slope and he'll speed down it; draw a jump and he'll go flying. Add one twist: the ability to draw surfaces that accelerate him, even going uphill, and the ability to draw decorative backgrounds, and you have the makings of a small online obsession. It's free and fun to play.

THE CAT CAM

Sites like Justin.TV, which mount cameras on people and broadcast their lives through their own eyes, are doomed to dullness. To be genuinely interesting, you'd have to undertake a project like this one: Cat Cam's proprietor developed a lightweight digital camera, mount it to his cat, and use it to see what the thing actually got up to. The answer: sitting under cars, staring at other cats, staring at other cats while sitting under cars with them. I.T.

webseven@globeandmail.com