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.
