The first Neil Gaiman book I ever read was “Art Matters”, a tiny blue hardcover of his words illustrated by Chris Riddell.
I fell in love with many of the lines in the book, and spotted something on this page:
Fiction builds empathy.
Fiction is something you build up from twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you and you alone, using your imagination, create a world, and people it and look out through other eyes.
You’re being someone else, and when you return to your own world, you’re going to be slightly changed.
That bit about “twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks”? It captured me. Everything about the complexity of language and ideas and communication distilled into simplicity you could hold.
And that’s the thing about words and writing. A simple line can rearrange your mind. A story can change a life.
So I beeped Neil, on tumblr, to ask if I could use the line for a company name. Had to change “twenty-six” to “26” because another company already had the name.
I didn’t think he’d see it, fully expecting it to disappear into the ether, but I figured it was worth a shot. While he does answer tumblr asks, he probably receives thousands a day.
I then forgot all about it, and carried on scrolling tumblr for days, until I decided to check my notifications and had a surprise waiting.
He replied! With an affirmative!
I replied a “thank you”, and started a company with a name inspired by something he wrote.
Screenshot:
26 Letters has been with me for a few years now. It’s the base for my writing and content-creation, and what I’m using to build on.
