While researching for my online communities post, I came across this comment by user Amirhossein, which immediately captivated my imagination, and which I thought I could expand on:
If technology can have a collaboration-oriented meaning, why can't art, music, thoughts and so forth? If we want to start thinking outside the box of Web 1.0, we should shift towards collaborative attitudes rather than original ones. We can have collaborative arts as well, a shared inspiration. What if people are to make a drawing, rather than a person? Can people contribute melodies to a music track to make a masterpiece?
The concept of collaborative art, or Wiki Art - the harnessing of a shared inspiration, is at once fascinating and intriguing! My initial response to Amirhossein was that it would be an interesting experiment in open source creative collaboration, but I did not believe that a masterpiece could come out of it. The idea of Wiki Art led me to Wiki Writing; as a creative writing student, I was interested to see if collaborative writing had ever been attempted. Not in the Wikipedia sense, which is non-fictive, open to be written, edited and approved collaboratively, but in a creative fiction sense. Is it possible for a community to write a novel?
I wandered through Google, and found a community that tried to do just that on A Million Penguins, which is the brainchild of Penguin Books and according to the main page, is
a collaborative, wiki-based creative writing exercise... 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. Can a collective create a believable fictional voice? Or will too many cooks spoil the broth?
SO interesting! 'A Million Penguins was launched on February 1, 2007 and was open for two months. The entire book is online, all 1030 pages of it, contributed to and edited by 1500 people! The scope of it is incredible. The novel itself is broken down into seven discrete sections, and one bizarre section called 'The Banana Section.' Not suprisingly, the book is incoherent, a complete mash-up of form, plot, content and structure. It is self referential: from the novel itself, 'The man was clearly mad. No rules? It would never work! You may as well get penguins to write a novel!' There is no real sense of accumulation, and it does not follow a logical or linear pattern. What IS clear is that the authors themselves were almost continually frustrated; in some sections, authors use the characters as thinly veiled mouthpieces to communicate to and argue with each other. The dominant tone of the novel is comic, if not just for the obvious chaos and author frustration. It's farce-like, exhausting, a perfect example of creative anarchy. 'A Million Books' wasn't free of vandals and graffiti artists either - at first it was plagued by porn, and then by bananas. The 'Banana Section' is a bizarre section which compiles all the chapters which were hit hard by the Banana Bomber. There are continual, ridiculous, hilarious references to bananas, and at many points in the section the author/s gives up on any sort of plot development, however illogical, and lapses into BANANA BANANA BANANA BANANA!
What I found interesting was the strong sense of community and accomplishment all authors felt. From the Million Penguins official blog:
It has been an amazing experience. I feel sorry to be losing this odd community and hope that there will be clusters who stay together and write together (user Joanna Howard).
... opening this experiment up to the world caused problems (but) the importance of this experiment was in the freedom of expression. On the whole I found respect and collaboration. On the way maybe Penguins community found its good identity through 'natural election' (user Neri).
An author can be inspired from their surroundings, experiences and by their community, but writing is ultimately led by the writer, and not the community. I'm not sure if there was ever a good chance of a 'collective creating a believable fictional voice,' just because believable writing needs to have a strong, constant voice. Good writing, I find, is fairly subtle, weaving through and lending itself towards a build-able climax. The author needs to have control of their story, and even if the characters develop such strong personalities that they seem to be making their own decisions, the author still needs to own his characters. This can't happen collectively. The experiment might have been more of a success, stylistically, if there was a smaller literary community involved - in regards to a novel, a large-scale community will not work together to form collective knowledge, like Wikipedia, as a novel is the product of a singular inspiration and will not work in this form (Vershbow, 2007).
As a novel in and of itself, 'A Million Penguins' was worthless, although I suppose it's hard to judge against the established form of writing, as it is an entirely new form. As a social experiment and a study into collaborative writing, and writing in general, it was utterly fascinating... a 'novel' experiment (bddm, tsss). I wish I had been involved in the process, because the strong community bond and sentiment formed throughout is amazing, admirable. From user Joanna Howard's blog:
For the past three weeks, I've been ankle-deep in wiki. I've witnessed writers enter full of hope and storm away again in despair, and an equal number stay to wallow with exhilaration in the steam intensity of group creativity.
The wonderful richness of different cultures contributing to this has been a moving study and intimacy of experience and vision.
References (accessed May 11):
