A Million Voices

"A million penguins” is an interesting project in keeping with the current spirit of collaborative networks. Initiated by Penguin publishers, this is a project which seeks to get individual amateur writers (hopefully, they also read) to collaborate in the making of an online book – a wiki-based creative writing exercise as they called it. Anybody can pick up the story where the last writer has left off and write the next chapter or so before getting tired and going off to sleep, leaving the next chapter to another aspiring Booker prize winner. People could also come back and edit a portion as many have done.

Over 1500 people wrote more than 1000 pages novel. And if proof is needed of the amount of trash that poses as serious user-generated content, this is it. The experiment is interesting for two reasons:
It shows up the number of people who are keen on experimenting with form and structure of the novel. Never mind that they don’t have the talent to follow that keenness up.
It also proves the point yet again that creative writing is simply not a collaborative exercise.

This is not new, but the second point in particular is important. Comment is today cheap; anybody can write a post or a comment. But quality / origin of that idea is a huge suspect.

As quality of novels go, the online space would be better off without it. At the end of it all, “a million penguins” is interesting for its ambitious scope and for helping make the point that many good voices can occasionally be a symphony but, untalented and untrained, it’s more likely to be a cacophony.