BRYAN I want to hear more about our narrator, Kirsty. Was it easy for you to find her voice?
ELY I think that was the only easy thing about the book. Um, for me, it’s about what I hear. And I’m really nosy. And I like to eariwig into people’s conversations. And I think Kirsty’s voice probably came from sitting on a bus, overhearing snatches of conversation. So it was there, embedded.
BRYAN When you start to grasp that voice, it becomes very easy to read the novel. Did you did you read aloud when you were writing it?
ELY Yes.
BRYAN And what did that do for you as a writer?
ELY If I can’t, if it doesn’t sound right, then it’s not right. You can’t put that bit in. I would go through every single sentence, and I would, I would, I would read every single sentence, and then I would read it again and read it again and I would write. Okay. Where’s the rhythm, where’s the beat? Um, and then I would read maybe a paragraph and I’d go back, I keep going back and I’d read the whole thing and the bits that would have to come out, because it would just - if you stopped and it didn’t sound like somebody talking to you. I mean, Duck Feet is really like 70 monologues and a lot of publishers that would say to me, um, maybe if you change the spelling, maybe if you’d written in proper English, then we might publish it. And I’m like, what do you want me to write? My father has very poorly toes. It doesnae sound right. It just it’s totally wrong. It has to be the way that a 12 year old girl from Renfrew would tell the story. It’s just the way she talks.
Description
In this short video, Ely Percy talks about the power of reading out loud and how they found Kirsty’s narrative voice through overheard conversations.
Now playing video 6 of 10
- 1 of 10
- 3 of 10
- 4 of 10
- 9 of 10
