Entertainment

Would You Like to Write a Book with Pharrell?

by Kadeen Griffiths

Ever since "Happy" became a smash hit, Pharrell Williams has been everywhere. If people aren't talking about that song, they're talking about the two songs Pharrell contributed to the Amazing Spider-Man 2 soundtrack, or they're talking about Pharrell's absurd collection of even more absurd buffalo hats. He's one of TIME Magazine's 100 Most Influential People for a reason, after all. In case you're getting a little tired of hearing his voice, he's now breaking into the printed word. Pharrell has released a new book called Inspiration and he's looking for a special co-writer — everyone.

Inspiration can currently be read online, but it's got a unique problem. It's the world's first ever "social book", which means it's a Mad Libs style narrative that's inviting people to chime in to guess the missing words. The book won't come out until all the words have been filled in, so the Internet had better get on that if anyone's expected to read it before 2015. The website warns that it won't be easy, however: "Some words will be easy to guess, others hard, but many will have hints to help you. Or not."

The book is also prefaced by a short clip called "The Hunter and the Bear in Pharrell Williams' Book", featuring the Hunter and the Bear locking themselves away in a cabin from screaming fans trying to get their hands on Inspiration before its release date. The Hunter is desperate to protect the book and the Bear takes things into his own hands by removing the words, thus setting up for the viewer to join the competition in English, French, German, Spanish, or Italian.

So far, only the first four pages have been unlocked and they're still mostly blank. When it does come out, revenue from Inspiration's sales will go to From One Hand to AnOTHER (FOTHA), Pharrell's nonprofit organization for underserved youths in at risk communities. It's an insanely creative concept, the likes of which is to be expected from the man who came up with "24 Hours of Happy" as a 24-hour long music video for his overplayed single. It seems that Pharrell never gets tired of coming up with innovative ways to promote whatever he happens to be doing in ways that are a lot more fun than the final product will actually turn out to be.

As great as a Mad Libs style novel would be consider the interesting minds that have access to a computer, it's probably for the best that Pharrell already wrote the book and is just having people guess what he wrote. Otherwise, Inspiration might be a mess of profanity, crude references, and nonsensical verb-noun combinations. The last time the Internet joined forces to do something simple — like, say, play Pokemon — it turned into an incoherent livestream of people fighting over a controller called Twitch Plays Pokemon.

The first person to guess each word will be credited as a writer in the book alongside Pharrell, so the whole enterprise is worth it for that alone. Putting co-writer of a book with Pharrell Williams will pad your resume so much you won't even need to list any other job.