I started writing when I was 15. I was really angry and frustrated at the world. At that time, I’d I’d had a brain injury the year before. I’d had to learn how to read and write again. But there was no facilities for kids with brain injuries in Scotland at that time. So they sent me to an adolescent psychiatry unit and it was really boring. It was the 90s. There was no internet, there was no mobile phones, and my mum had brought a magazine up. It was it was Big magazine. And at the time it was 1993, Big magazine, and there was a letters page in that, and it was Victor Bog-off asking kids to write in and say how terrible their life was. And I thought, aye, I can do that. And I was so bored and so annoyed that I just I sat and wrote a letter to Victor about everything, everybody that I hated, all the things that I hated. And after I’d written it, I felt a lot better. It was really cathartic. At that point, normal people would have probably just not sent the letter. But I did. And then I wrote more letters, and for the duration of the time that I was in there, three and a half months, I’d write to Victor 2 or 3 times a week, every week, and sent all these letters. Went back to school on the January, and I remember walking through, walking through the lunch hall. And it’s quite difficult when you’re, when you’ve been off school for a long time and one of the kids in the year above me shouting, “oh my God, you’re famous!” And I was in Big magazine, right, but I never wrote to this magazine again after that, but I didn’t have to because I’d been validated. But I did keep writing.
Description
Ely Percy, author of Duck Feet, talks about writing to a magazine as a teenager and how this inspired their writing career on BBC Authors Live.
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