Crowdsourcing has brought us some wonderful things: Wikipedia, Urban Dictionary, Threadless, Khan Academy—just to name a few. But a novel written by the Internet? We’re not so sure that’s a good idea.
The Collabowriters, which was conceived and created by Chicago-based artist Willy Chyr, is “an experiment in creating a crowdsourced novel.” To participate, all you have to do is register. From there, you can submit content and vote on what lines should make it into the story. The novel is being pieced together sentence by sentence as users enter submissions (of up to 140 characters) and the rest of the community votes—giving the proposed sentence a score of either +1 or -1.
According to the project’s website, “The submission with the highest score becomes the sentence in the novel, or at least until another submission surpasses its score. In order to proceed to the next sentence of the novel, one of the submissions in the current sentence must receive at least a score of 5.”
Here is an excerpt from the novel so far:
It was a dark and stormy night. Zachary, wet and miserable, had been dispatched by his father to scamper across town to pick up some drugs for his step-mother. From the road, he could see the still frozen river. It was only March but it was starting to melt. In a week, the ice would be gone. The barbed sweet stenches of sewage wafting up between the ice cracks on the canal were arrogantly broadcasting an early spring. From somewhere across the canal, a soft sound was barely audible over the moan of shifting ice and garbage: "Help."
Zachary stopped, at first unsure of what he had heard. But through the sound of the rain, he heard the cry again, this time louder. Apprehensive but curious, he gingerly approached the source of the noise with deliberate steps. Zack found the source of the sound and froze: a two-way radio. While common in the past, batteries hadn't existed for at least two decades. What was something so precious doing in the slush next to the canal? "Jackpot," he whispered.
Hmm . . . it’s no masterpiece but it isn’t completely terrible either. Frankly, we’re curious to see if this book will ever actually be finished. According to
Publisher’s Weekly, the median length of a
novel is about 64,000 words. So far
The Collabowriters have agreed upon around 550. With no word or time limit, the end of this story could be a long time coming.
What do you think SodaHeads? Is crowdsourcing a novel a clever idea or a recipe for disaster?
It's not for me- I wouldn't want to be behind this idea but I'd gladly participate in it just to get my two cents out. I'm not worried about the money or other things. In this fast paced world where people rarely talk to each other and consider their feelings, it's a great global outreach and communication get together which I appreciate! Maybe new literary ideas and inventions can come out of this creative group thinking!
Though the story sounds like the start of something I could have written in the forth grade with my handy-dandy thesaurus (using words like "dispatch" and "scamper" is so unnecessary, sometimes simple is better).
But as long as they're having fun and don't take themselves too seriously I'm sure nothing but good can come out of multiple minds working on one thing.