A Million Penguins

There’s a creative train wreck going on over at Penguin Books UK: a wiki novel.

You’ve heard of National Novel Writing Month, where 80,000 writers each try to draft the full arc of a novel in one month. But what if that many novelists were to collaborate on a single story?

That’s precisely the 6-week experiment of A Million Penguins, underway since February 1. Structured on a wiki (specifically, the type underlying Wikipedia), the project’s question, “Can a million penguins sitting at a million keyboards together write a novel?” is reminiscent of the Infinite Monkey Theorem.

Although deciphering the novel itself requires some determination at this point, the editor’s blog gives an accessible, big-picture view of the process and some of its most creative aspects.