Wu Ming: Lessons from the 'Decameron'
Wu Ming means "anonymous" in Chinese, in addition to being the common hallmark among Chinese citizens who demand democracy and freedom of expression.
And Wu Ming is the battle name that a group of Italian writers (very politically combative) have chosen to sign the novels that they have written collectively since 1999, many of them translated into various languages.
The last one is titled
Proletkult
(edited by Anagrama), it is a story of revolution, science fiction, aliens, scientific experiments and proletarian art and it has just hit Spanish bookstores.
This peculiar literary cooperative is now made up of three members but it had up to five members.
The question is, how the hell do you write a book with six, with 10 hands?
"It can be said that a group of writers is like a rock band in which they all play the same instrument: the computer keyboard," the Wu Ming explained to us via email.
Common illustration used by the Wu Ming writers collective.
Surrealists experimented at the beginning of the 20th century by making exquisite corpses.
The game consisted of writing or drawing something on a piece of paper, folding it so that the next person could only see the final words or strokes, adding their part and passing it on to the next participant.
Wu Ming works differently on a logistical level.
But not so much.
The ideas in his books are born from the talks that they have all together for months, in which they launch ideas, discuss, venture hypotheses and make suggestions until the embryo of the story and the profile of the characters take shape.
"We start to write only when we have
elaborated a rundown
, which works as a map of the novel. Then we commission one of the first draft of a chapter, which we then collectively edit. And then it is up to another to draft the next chapter", they explain to us.
If a narrative solution does not convince the three Wu Ming, it is not about mediating or reaching an agreement: they choose another that is more emphatic or more decisive.
"It takes time, sure, but the end result will convince three people instead of one, so it
is very likely to be more effective
."
Obviously, there is no shortage of literary conflicts between them.
But they say that criticism is very healthy when working collectively.
"
We have learned to trust criticism, they are our best friends.
And especially if it is one of the partners who makes them."
The Wu Ming met when they were in college and became friends.
None of them wrote, so they discovered the trade collectively.
"And that has been very important to develop our working method", they underline.
"If we had been individual writers, it might have been difficult for us to find a collective method. But
we were born first as collective authors
and later also as solo writers."
They argue that writing in a group has its advantages.
The first: that imagining a story between several is much
easier and more stimulating
than doing it alone.
But, in addition, working with six hands allows to produce a greater amount of text and thus deal with long and complex frames that one could hardly manage alone.
Not to mention the possibility of harnessing the literary talents of various people.
"The disadvantage is that
the income from writing must be divided
by three," they complain.
The fact that Wu Ming is a literary collective also has a lot to do with its political principles, very present in all its novels, in which
the influence of the cinema,
music, and comics
is strongly felt
.
After all, they do not consider literature as an art superior to popular culture.
"For us, writing is undoubtedly a mode of political struggle. We never choose the stories we tell by chance. Every time you choose a story you fulfill
a political choice,
whether consciously or unconsciously," they say.
"Undoubtedly, our poetics and narrative practice reflect our vision of the world. Style is the synthesis of ethics and aesthetics, and this serves both in the way of being before others and in the way of writing and telling."
One of the political demands of the Wu Ming is embodied in the fact that, from the beginning, all their books can be
downloaded for free as
long as they are not used for profit.
They think that it is fair that the object "book" has a price, because writing it, making it and distributing it carries a cost.
But they consider that this does not mean that the text can be
freely
accessible
.
They have been like Wu Ming for 20 years now, although in reality they have been writing collectively for a quarter of a century, previously under the pseudonym Luther Blisset.
During all this time they have lost a couple of members along the way, Wu Ming 3 and Wu Ming 5. "At a certain point
the harmony with them ended
. It happens even in the best families."
"For a literary group it is not more difficult to last in time than for a rock band," they argue.
"Some gangs at one point dissolve, and others, despite defections,
exist for decades
."
And Wu Ming, fortunately, belongs to the second category.
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