Writing Success: Q&A with Ely Percy

Ely Percy with Ellen Desmond

Photography by Rawpixel, via Unsplash 

Ellen Desmond discusses the ideas we have of success and failure with writer Ely Percy, ahead of the release of their new novel Vicky Romeo Plus Joolz

Q. Knight Errant Press is publishing your first novel next year! How are you feeling about it?

A. Very excited. Very humbled. And a tiny bit terrified.

Q. What will the book be about?

A. Vicky Romeo Plus Joolz, is a butch-meets-femme lesbian rom-com set in Glasgow, in 2001. My narrator, Vicky, is a half-Scottish-half-Italian, 21 year old, out-and-proud, butch lesbian and an aspiring actor. Vicky’s life begins to unravel the moment she falls for 21 year old Julie Turner aka Joolz, a sassy, sarcastic disco diva and newcomer to Glasgow’s gay scene; she relates her story in the flash-back style typically used in Italian-American gangster movies, starting from the morning after Joolz dumps her; we’re then propelled three months back in time to the night the pair first meet.

There are, of course, other storylines running parallel to Vicky and Joolz’s romance: Vicky’s mum, Maria, (who is also a lesbian) wants her to forget acting and apply to college; Joolz hasn’t told her mum she’s gay and is desperately trying to keep it a secret; Vicky joins an all-women theatre group but clashes with the artistic director – she also finds rehearsals for ‘The Importance Of Being Earnest’ uncomfortable because she’s had a one-night-stand with one of her co-stars.

“The time period in the novel is probably the most important thing because it represents a distinct era where LGBTQ+ people were still very much ghettoised, and queer relationships were considered taboo despite the scrapping of the Section 28 ‘gay law’ in Scotland in June 2000, and the equalization of the legal age of consent that soon followed.”

The time period in the novel is probably the most important thing because it represents a distinct era where LGBTQ+ people were still very much ghettoised, and queer relationships were considered taboo despite the scrapping of the Section 28 ‘gay law’ in Scotland in June 2000, and the equalization of the legal age of consent that soon followed. It also pays homage to an early online dating culture where chat rooms and internet cafes were used (often covertly) as opposed to hook-up apps like Grindr or Tinder.

Q. You published a memoir when you were just 24. Can you tell us a little more about that and how that success must have felt?

A. I started writing Cracked when I was nineteen, in response to something my creative writing tutor at college said. He’d initially suggested that I should write about my childhood, to which I responded (quite moodily) that this would be an impossible task because I had been diagnosed with retrograde amnesia and couldn’t remember anything before the age of fourteen; he then said: ‘Well, why don’t you write about what it feels like to NOT remember your childhood.’

So I did. I wrote about not being able to remember who I was, or who my family and friends were, and having to relearn how to read and write; I wrote about misdiagnosis and having to attend a behavioural unit for problem kids where the psychiatrist was convinced that I was on drugs; I wrote about the relief of finding out months later that the reason for my memory loss was because I’d had a brain injury, and about my experience of being incarcerated in an adolescent psychiatric unit because by the time I got a correct diagnosis, I was really quite depressed. I wrote about a lot of other normal, angsty, teenage things including bullying and exam stress and sexuality. And I took a lot of breaks from writing it because sometimes it got too much to deal with.
Nothing could have prepared me for the response I got when the book was published five years later: I ended up in nearly every Scottish newspaper and a few of the UK-wide ones; The Herald put me on a list of people under 35 most likely to succeed in their chosen profession; the BBC made a documentary; I was invited on GMTV, and asked to speak at colleges and conventions; I even ended up with a job at the local college facilitating a creative writing class for adults with mental health problems.
People in my neighbourhood who’d crossed the street to avoid me after my accident were suddenly craning their necks to talk to me; I had gone from feeling like shit to being ‘the sheeit’, and it was wonderful and inspiring, but at times, a bit overwhelming.

Q. Rejection is part of life for every writer. What do you do to self-care — if anything — when feedback gets difficult?

A. I started sending my stuff out when I was just fifteen, because I felt angry and misunderstood and rejected by the world. I sent letters every week to Big! magazine with no expectation of them ever being published. This was in the Autumn ’93 during the three-and-a-half-months I spent in psychiatric care. When someone at school said I was ‘famous’ because something I’d written had been printed in Victor Bog-off’s letter page, I was both shocked and elated. I never sent anything to Big! again. I didn’t need to. I’d been validated.

Although I continued to write incessantly, I didn’t send anything else out for a period of about eighteen months after that. My next acceptance came about because my mum had secretly posted one of my poems to a competition in another teenage magazine; the first I knew of this, was when I received a response in the mail telling me I was one of the winners.

In 2002 (the same year Cracked was published), I applied to do an MPhil in Creative Writing at Glasgow University. I did so in the notion that I probably wouldn’t get in. I got lucky and became the first person to be accepted onto the course purely on portfolio merit (I didn’t have an undergraduate degree and still don’t). Later, I submitted a large part of the third draft of ‘Vicky Romeo Plus Joolz’ as my final portfolio – I graduated with distinction.

Unfortunately, the more I honed my writing skills, the more difficult it became to deal with rejection: receiving an email that said my work was ‘niche’ or ‘not marketable’ could send me into a black mood that lasted for days. I was my own worst critic, though: my biggest problem stemmed from the shame I felt at not having secured a second book deal following my graduation; I believed I’d let myself and my tutors down, that I’d been given a massive opportunity by getting onto the MPhil and I’d somehow fucked it up. This escalated to the point where I found it difficult to socialise with other writers, and the fear and embarrassment of bumping into people I knew from uni became excruciating; I hated them asking how my writing was going because – well – what was I supposed to say? Eventually, I stopped going to book events altogether and several friendships waned as a result.

By the age of thirty, I’d decided I was washed up and a loser (this was despite being awarded an arts council grant and a bursary for an Arvon Course earlier that same year). I’d worked hard and pinned all my hopes on getting a novel published in my twenties, and I felt it was an affront that I hadn’t managed it. If I couldn’t be a writer, then what could I do with my life? I was rubbish at everything else. It didn’t help that around this time I was struck down with plantar fasciitis (a disorder that affects the connective tissue in the arch of the foot); long-distance running had been something that I’d used to keep both my physical fitness and my mental health in balance, and suddenly it became a source of pain; not being able to get out with my jogging buddies or go on the treadmill left me feeling stuck in a rut.

“I’d worked hard and pinned all my hopes on getting a novel published in my twenties, and I felt it was an affront that I hadn’t managed it. If I couldn’t be a writer, then what could I do with my life?”

However, throughout all this, I did manage to do exercises set by Julia Cameron (author of several self-help books for writers and artists). Someone had given me a copy of The Artist’s Way just before my 30th birthday and I’d mowed through it. I have written ‘morning pages’ almost every day for over ten years now; I can’t recommend her books enough.

Q. You recently shared a story on Twitter about your experience of getting back up after a first novel failed to sell. Do you want to tell us more about the links between your mental health story and your writing career?

A. My lowest point came aged 31, when I had a nervous breakdown. I don’t remember much about this period except that I spent a lot of time sitting alone on my living room couch, watching reruns of Bad Girls and Prisoner: Cell Block H or simply staring into space.

‘Nobody told me that when you hit rock bottom, you often have to crawl along the rough surface for a prolonged and unpleasant period before you can get back up.’
That’s actually a line from the manuscript I’m working on at the moment. Kingstreet – which is set in the same world as Vicky Romeo Plus Joolz – is the story of Allen Cassidy, a fallen hero, who is struggling to find his voice. I’ve been writing the novel on-and-off for over a decade. I used to think that spending so much time trying to get inside the head of a man who was jaded and depressed was what was causing me to have bouts of unhappiness. I finally realised though, that Allen’s story contained echoes of my own, and that a part of me desperately wanted to communicate my perceived failure and the anger and disappointment and loneliness that was attached to it.

Q. What would you like to tell your younger self about your journey to success after what you called on Twitter “a fall from grace”?

A. I’d simply repeat the brilliant advice that Janice Galloway gave our class on my first day at uni; it went something along the lines of: ‘It takes more than talent to write a book. It takes perseverance. It might not help you to write a good book, but perseverance will enable you to write a book. Of course, it takes perseverance and talent to write a good book.’

Back then, I thought I understood exactly what Janice was talking about: I thought I understood all there was to know about perseverance because of my experiences with the medical community, and because I’d already been writing and sending my work out for nine years by then; I thought she meant that the MPhil would be hard-going, but if we stuck with it and turned up to class and took the critiques from our tutors on the nose, then in another two years I’d be well on my way to seeing my novel on the fiction shelves in Waterstones. It makes me cringe now, just thinking about how incredibly naïve I was.

I’d also like to add that just because someone rejects your work, it doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t like it. It could simply be that it’s not what they are looking for at that moment. After all, why would you eat a bar of chocolate when what you really fancy is a packet of crisps?!

Q. Do you ever use writing as a way of working through difficult times?

A. Yes. I recently started rereading Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down The Bones (a book I bought about twenty years ago) and I’m pleased to report that it’s helped me to finally make some headway in writing about a couple of other topics that are painful for me.

Q. As our issue is success/failure themed, what does success mean to you? Do you think we define it too narrowly?

A. I think that life is made up of lots of tiny successes and failures, and for me success can be something as simple as winning a game of scrabble or as complex as writing and publishing a novel.

“We often hear heavily edited versions of writers’ journeys that focus on literary achievement and the end result rather than the process of writing and learning from our mistakes and our rebuffs, and this is why I believe twitter campaigns such as #ShareYourRejections are so important.”

The trick is keeping these things in balance. We often hear heavily edited versions of writers’ journeys that focus on literary achievement and the end result rather than the process of writing and learning from our mistakes and our rebuffs, and this is why I believe twitter campaigns such as #ShareYourRejections are so important.

Q. Finally, when can readers expect the new book?

A. *Fingers crossed* Vicky Romeo Plus Joolz will be published by Knight Errant Press on the 14th February 2019.