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ROB BACK
A Book with Ten Thousand Authors
The internet is an amazing place: a place with the capacity to change the way that we live, work and think. Instant downloads and file sharing have revolutionized the music industry; YouTube and its ilk are set to do the same for film. Literature, however, has yet to be impacted in the same way. That, at least, is the view of the UK author Chris Baker.
“Blogging has been an important development,” he tells us, “but it is essentially a new medium that writers are using to do what they have always done – share their thoughts with the world.”
Baker’s own solution is to be found in his community writing project, “I want a word”, based at the website www.iwantaword.com. Through this site Baker is looking for ten thousand people to each contribute a word of their choice to the project. When all ten thousand words have been submitted, Baker will add some more words of his own and create a single, coherent story. If he fails to receive ten thousand contributions by the end of 2008, Baker will close the project to new submissions and write the book using the words submitted up to that point.
“This felt like a really good way to get people involved in the writing of a novel,” says Baker “and I think the end result could be something really special, something genuinely unique.”
A quick look at the myspace page that Baker has set up for the project reveals a widely supportive response to the idea, although there have been some notable exceptions, mostly focussing on the fact that Baker is charging contributors £1 for the right to submit a word to his project (in return for their £1, users get their name, or their company/website name, displayed on the website and in the final book). Baker’s justification for the charge is that it forces people to think more carefully about their choice of word, and discourages spammers and other malicious users, as well as helping to cover the running cost of the project. Is that a convincing enough justification? I guess that is a question to which only time can reveal the answer, but in response to the criticism, Baker has elaborated further:
“I know lots of people won’t believe me, but the money is really not my motivation for running this project. My true motivation is twofold. Firstly, I love writing and am genuinely excited to find out how this book is going to turn out. Secondly, as an aspiring author it’s really hard to get noticed by the publishing industry and this seemed like a good way to raise my profile a bit. In the event that the project does make £10,000, I intend to give the money to my dad: he’s the one who’s given me the support and encouragement to get the project up and running, so I think he deserves it!”
At the moment, such a result is still along way off. Baker has sold only 24 words, including such gems as “beaver”, “intralapsarian”, “galligaskin” and “congee”. It’s clear that the final book is going to be something a bit unusual, but Baker doesn’t see that as a problem.
“If people contributed ‘normal’ words, the book would just end up like every other book. It’s the unusual words that will make the final book unique. It is a bit scary when I see some of the words that have been submitted, but it’s exciting too!”
It’s true that there are question marks about how good a novel can be if it is not the vision of a single author, with a single aim and a choice of words finely tuned to fit that aim, but you have to admire Baker’s willingness to try something new. And it’s certain that the final product will be something new and unique. Will it change the face of literature? It seems unlikely but, as James Dewar once said, and Baker himself often quotes:
“Minds are like parachutes: they only work if they’re open.”
ROB BACK is a freelance writer living and working in the UK.
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