BRYAN - It feels very authentic throughout the thing that’s that’s missing from it, because it’s set in the 2000, is social media and all the pressures and the challenges that brings. Would it have been a very different novel if you’d set it now?
ELY - I think it would have been different. But I mean, I wrote Duck Feet in 2004 so there wasn’t any social media. It was, it was Bebo, you know, MySpace. We didn’t have Twitter, we didn’t have Instagram. We didn’t have anything like that.
So yeah, there would have been… The technology would have been different. But I’ve spoke, I spoke to so many people when I was writing this book and asked them about their high school experiences, people that were younger than me, people that were older than me, like my youngest person that I spoke to was 13 in 2004. And what I discovered from all of them was it doesn’t matter how old you were or what school you went to in Scotland. If you went to high school in Scotland, then no matter what age you were, the only things that change are technology and politics, because there’s always your best pal, your worst enemy, the class clown, the girl that gets pregnant at 15, the wee person everybody says smells. You’ve got all they people that are still there, whether it’s 2025 or 2001.
Description
In this clip from BBC Authors Live, Ely Percy talks about the impact of social media and writing about school in the 2000s.
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