One Million Monkeys Typing

One Million Monkeys Typing: A Collaborative Writing Project

One Million Monkeys Typing is an online collaborative writing project that is part Exquisite Corpse and part Choose Your Own Adventure. The project allows for multiple authors to write their own segments (“snippets”) of a story. Each snippet can be ranked by other authors (dubbed “monkey authors” on the site) and can have the opportunity for three offshoot snippets to be “grafted” to itself. The more successful story branches (as defined by ranking and additional offshoots) thrive and the low ranking branches wither and die off.

The inspiration for One Million Monkeys Typing came a year before its March 2007 inception when the developers of the site were casually discussing the “malleability” of text. The original idea was that it would be interesting to take a book and put it online and allow people to write their alternate endings that could be ranked by the community. The idea quickly spread to writing entire stories in a collaborative fashion. The creators believed that with the addition of ranking snippets and pruning poorly-performing story arcs, a never-ending, ever-improving text would emerge.

How it works
There are many stories available to add to on the site, and all trees are user-generated. The ability for a monkey author to plant a seed (create a story/tree) must be earned by writing snippets on existing trees (stories). After logging in and creating an account the monkey author can:
1) Pick a story to READ - the many stories on the site are represented as “trees” in a grove. They have different word counts from 50 to 300 words allowed per snippet. They all have small descriptions next to their titles and the user can see how popular the tree is by its size (seedling to sawtimber). The monkey author can continue reading as far as the story arc has been written or can choose to add their own snippet.
2) WRITE a snippet - if inspired the user can “graft” their own writing onto a snippet they’ve read. Each snippet has the ability to have three different offshoots written off of it. Grafting can only occur if not all three offshoots have already been written.
3) PUBLISH the snippet onto the site - by hitting “graft”. Once the snippet is published the monkey author is encouraged to promote that snippet externally so that it might get ranked well and added to and become a thriving story arc.

Press
Utne Reader - Fiction 2.0 by Brendan Mackie 1/30/08
Paste Magazine - An Online Treehouse for Literary Monkeys by Alissa Wilkinson 07/02/08

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