In the beginning there were no computers, no Internet. Animals communicated with each other in a purity without words, bereft of the symbolic intricacies of language. Of course it was always eat or be eaten, as usual. Then the monkeys decided to come down out of the trees. They used sticks to measure the depth of water and bananas to draw things in the sand. Later they chipped things into stone. Invented a printing press. One clever one with a name that rhymed with ‘cabbage’, invented a mechanical computer. Which led to an electronic computer. A PC. A Modem. Which leads us to why we are here today: in deep trouble.

— from “The Third Chapter” section — since eliminated — of the wikinovel A Million Penguins

“Deep trouble” seems like an apt description of the carnage which took place during the collaborative writing of A Million Penguins, Penguin’s just-concluded “wikinovel” experiment. Our representative checked in regularly throughout the five-week process and described how the arctic water ran red with penguin blood as participants from around the globe waged wiki-warfare to defend every syllable of their precious contributions. Textual battles (where contributors erased previous contributions and substituted their own) caused a number of authors to go underground, where they could work diligently away, alone or with a few loyal confederates, on their own private versions of “A Million Penguins.” In addition to the main version of the novel, we are left with a Banana version; while another page lists more than half a dozen other “alternate versions” of AMP (including the enticingly-titled “Novel A” and “Novel B,” as well as the more provocative “Alternative Novel 1.”)

AMP was to be an experiment in “Crowdsourcing. The Wisdom of the crowds. Social networking. Collaborative enterprise” — an investigation into how those concepts might be applied to the writing of fiction. Jeremy, one of the Penguin-assigned editors, posed the question: “Can a collective create a believable fictional voice?” — a question which naturally made this experiment of great interest to the t&p editorial collective (who have always harboured serious literary ambitions themselves).

Alas: based on the evidence at hand, the news is bleak indeed (that is, if you define “a novel” as “a story that we would be interested in reading.”) Imagine a book in which the characters appear and disappear — or change their names and professions — without warning or explanation; a book in which themes evolve and are then snuffed out; in which every rereading reveals a completely unfamiliar plot. To me this sounds like a manuscript in serious need of a patient editor (or chucking out).

Some interesting AMP statistics are cited in a recent posting to the wikinovel’s accompanying blog:

Nearly 1500 of you have contributed to the writing and editing of A Million Penguins, contributing over 11,000 edits making this, in the words of Penguin’s Chief Executive, “not the most read, but possibly the most written novel in history.” 75000 people have visited the site and there have been more than 280,000 page views.

Penguin’s Jeremy is more hopeful about the results of the AMP experiment than are we (there is even talk of converting the 1030 pages of the wikinovel into an ebook). Now that the wikinovel’s text has been “locked down,” Jeremy optimistically tells us that “a fifteen hour plane flight on Friday will enable me, I hope, to read it in a single sitting, as I would read a traditional novel.” To which we here at t&p say: “best of luck with that.”

What have we learned from “A Million Penguins”? That the urge to write is strong indeed; but the urge to edit is even stronger.