Wiki Novel

I'm not sure it's possible to write a novel in the form of a wiki but I am using a wiki to write the first draft of the novel. In the process of doing that, I was a little stuck recently and the wiki saved me.

I must clarify here that I am not talking about a collaborative wiki. I am talking about a simple wiki tool (TiddlyWiki), designed primarily for a single user.

The main character in this novel is supposed to come up with the draft of a Knowledge Management strategy for the organization she works for. I was wondering if I was going to be able to write the KM strategy for a fictional organization. Up to now, I have been able to write the story without getting too specific about the organization itself. I was also wondering if anyone was actually going to want to read through a ten-page KM strategy in the middle of a novel. My current answer is that I'm only going to provide an annotated outline of the KM strategy, and it's going to include a lot of questions that my main character has about the strategy. She's going to post it in a wiki and she's developing a strategy for getting feedback on the wiki as well as to keep the strategy as a living/growing document on the wiki.

Of course, this allows me to use my wiki tool to make the whole section much more interactive. There's an annotated outline that can be read in a linear fashion, but within this outline, there are hyperlinks to all kinds of definitions, resources, etc...

Until today, I was using TiddlyWiki essentially as a drafting and editing tool. I'm now seeing that it could also be a publishing tool for the novel.

Having drafted this post earlier today, I started to wonder if someone had already used a wiki to write a novel. The answer is "yes". There have been attempts at writing novels with a collaborative wiki and there's even an article on using TiddlyWiki to write a novel. Here is the article: "Organize your novel with a Wiki" by writer LJ Cohen.

Here's also more on an adaptation of TiddlyWiki to publish hypertext stories: Tweebox.