![[Logo]](/images/101ReasonsLogo.png "101 Reasons to Stop Writing")
Fantasy novelist and scam-buster Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware discusses the newest Infinite Monkeys experiment, A Million Penguins, a “Wiki novel” set up by editors at Penguin and writing students at de Montfort University. So (someone who works at) a reputable publisher is getting behind a collaborative fiction project, something that is sure to make Web 2.0 zealots start singing the “The Future Is Now”.
If you’re not familiar with wikis, the principle is that anyone can write, and edit, the content. Anyone, at any time. Imagine leaving a manuscript in a public park with a pair of scissors an a ballpoint pen, and you get the idea. I don’t assume the project creators actually believed a readable, let alone publishable, novel would emerge. I hope it was intended to be an examination of how a project like this would fail.
It’s easy and obvious to point out that the result so far is pretty shit (no, wait, it’s been edited, it’s now shite), but the real fascination is the utter chaos that has overtaken the project, after only a week (it’s been edited again, it’s now shiiiit). It’s forked into multiple novels, which by itself is failure, if the expectation was one single work. Even the Penguin guy who’s reviewing the process has said it “resists rational enquiry” - in his first post.
It’s become its own author, in a sense, a self-evolving work, comparable to a novel in the same way that a well-tended garden is comparable to an overpopulated city. Pseudo-intellectual poseur that I am, I’m reminded of a passage from William Gibson’s Neuromancer:
[It] was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.
There’s little point in me saying stop writing, because the people drawn to contribute to such a project resist rational enquiry. Perhaps the most important criticism is that while I’m curious about the process, I have no interest in reading the result.
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Can’t wait to see the first royalty statement for the collaborative book. “No, that was MY word. Yours was ‘discombobulate’”
Hey Simon. There won’t be any royalties.
This whole project was cooked up by a couple coke snorting editors at a fashion show or something.
Editor 1: Hey, Nigel. I got a great fucking idea.
Editor 2: Yeah? Lay it on me.
Editor 1: Right, so look. Let’s get a bunch of sorry, sad sacks to write us a book for free.
Editor 2: Wait you mean…
Editor 1: Yes.
Editor 2: Brilliant fucking idea. A Wikibook, and we retain ALL THE RIGHTS.
(Both editors devolve into mad scientist laughs)
Here’s the important fine print on the MillionPenguins Wiki:
By posting your submission on the Wiki Novel and the Site, you grant us a non-exclusive, perpetual, royalty-free, world-wide licence to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, publish, distribute and display any content you submit to us in any format now known or later developed. If you do not want to grant us these rights, please do not submit your content to us.
Torrey, I don’t think anyone involved in this project has/had realistic expectations of a publishable result.
The grant of rights clause is pretty standard stuff for any wiki project. It couldn’t function if there was any issue over rights.
Rights only matter to the extent that you can legally abuse the rights abuser. Anyone who is obsessive about protecting their rights should stop writing, at least on the Internet.
Sean: Well, yeah. I know. I just thought it’d be entertaining to run with Simon’s throw away comment.
I agree. If you give a rat’s ass about your intellectual property, this isn’t the way to go about protecting it.
It’s a hell of a soap box though.
P.S. When I read Miss Snark’s blog entry on sex scenes, the first thing I thought of doing was linking to your Reason To Stop about sex scenes. Then I hit the comment string and saw you beat me to it. Bastard.