26 Fruits

If you’re a writer, there’s an assumption that you’re not interested in numbers. Even if you’re a business writer, people seek out specialists to write about finance. And that’s fair enough. I’m never going to claim to prefer reading a balance sheet to a novel.

But I do think there is a fascination with numbers deep inside every writer. This was particularly brought home to me last week during a particularly good meeting of the Board of 26, the group for writers I co-founded in 2003 with seven other writers. www.26.org.uk

The name itself derives from the 26 letters in the English alphabet. As soon as Tim Rich suggested it, seven years ago, I thought ‘that’s the one’. Put two writers together in a room and we might not agree on a word; put all eight writers in a room and we’d previously failed to agree on a name. But a name that was a number, that was too good to resist.

It’s been an amazing creative catalyst too. We’ve had projects involving 26 writers and 26 designers producing posters for each of the letters of the alphabet. That was our first project, shown at the British Library in 2004. But there have been many projects since, involving the number 26 or its near relatives – Swedish designers, for example, did a 28 project based on our idea, adding in extra letters from the Swedish alphabet. And, of course, with 26 ways of looking at a blackberry I’ve extended the number constraint into my latest book.

For the 26 Board meeting this week, we looked at ideas for the coming year, dozens of them – to give a looser number than usual. It was interesting how our number obsession drove us to create and adapt ideas towards particular constraints. There’s an idea for a massive project in Edinburgh, involving the 26 bus. There was another idea, perhaps as part of the London Design Festival, which would lead to writer/filmmaker pairs creating 26 second viral films. And there’s the big current idea, beginning to happen now, of a project between 26 and International PEN to mark the 50^th anniversary of the Writers in Prison campaign. We’re planning to take part with 50 writers contributing 50 words on the 50 days leading up to the Free the Word festival in April. (Thank you to the 83 writers who have so far volunteered – we’ll find a solution to the number challenge.)

What it means is that the world we live in is filled with numbers. We use numbers to give meaning to our lives, to find our way around, to reach other people, to remember, to mark time. As writers for business too, we’re always being challenged, and I would say liberated, by the challenge of word counts. Even if your direct client doesn’t give you a word count – 500 words, say – the designer you’re working with probably will. I’m now hitting my own word limit, so that’s enough for today – except to point out that last week we passed this date in the calendar. 11.01.10. It made me smile as numbers often do.