How To Write An Autobiographical Novel When You Can't Remember Anything 

When I set out to write Duck Feet based on my own experiences of going to school in Renfrew, there was just one tiny problem. Due to being diagnosed with retrograde, anterograde and post-traumatic amnesia following a brain injury, I don't actually have any memories at all from before the age of fourteen, which includes most of the time I spent at Renfrew High. So, here's how to write an award-winning autobiographical novel when you can't remember anything.

1. Take what you can and swerve the rest
   
   I was twenty-six when I started writing Duck Feet, and I could remember some things – a little from when I was fourteen and more from ages fifteen to eighteen. I remember going to see Take That and buying That Earrings (all Take That memorabilia was preceded by 'That'), and getting the top of my ear pierced so I could be like Robbie Williams. I remember my Sweater Shop jumpers and Benzini Jeans, and buying a pair of baby blue shoes that cost £40 – a fortune to teenage me – that got "christened" with a permanent black smudge by a boy in my class on the first day I wore them.
   
   More importantly, I know vividly what it's like to be a fish out of water. I'd been the new kid when I transferred from Renfrew High to Linwood – and it didn’t seem like a particularly big jump to write about starting first year. It probably helped that I had a younger sister, and I could remember what she was like at twelve. The only thing I really struggled with was technology. I'm a decade older than my protagonist, Kirsty, and her pals. I left high school in 1997 and Kirsty didn't start until 2001, and unlike her we didn't have mobiles or the internet. And most people didn't have the internet at home either. But by the time Kirsty was fifteen, all her pals would’ve had phones and been online. So, in the end I decided that Kirsty's dad Jamie would be the one wanting a computer and that Kirsty would be reluctant to embrace social media – so I was able to bring out a different side of Kirsty's character and show her being dismissive of her pals' obsession with their Bebo profiles.
2. Make it feel mighty real
   
   I often tell people that Kirsty’s voice came from nowhere, but I probably stored it in my head unconsciously after overhearing some random teenager talking on a Renfrew bus. I earwig on conversations on public transport all the time.
   
   With previous writing I've written in-depth character profiles or interviewed my characters by asking them a hundred questions, but I didn't do that with Duck Feet. I wrote the first draft in a stream of consciousness – but I did speak to lots of people who grew up in Renfrew. Authenticity is really important to me, and I wanted to make sure I was getting things right.
    
3. Don't tell your characters everything
   
   I love writing in the first person and I only ever wanted to tell this story from Kirsty’s point-of-view. But that means there are some limitations, because your character can't narrate what they wouldn't know. So, Kirsty is a straight, white, cis, able-bodied neurotypical lassie – and that means she doesn't have to navigate some of the things her friends do, so I couldn't go into as much depth as I would have liked about things to do with queerness and disability, which are things that are part of my own lived experiences. But they're not part of Kirsty's. So, Kirsty could talk about how she always knew that her pal Chris was gay, and what it felt like to go to a gay bar with him for the first time, but she could only speculate on what coming out was like for him and how his neurodivergence might have impacted on that; he didn’t talk to her in any detail about those things. 
   
   I have a rule when it comes to first, second or limited third person viewpoints: don’t tell your characters everything!
    
4. Use the right voice
   
   Duck Feet received a lot of rejections over a sixteen-year period, and I had folk tell me that if I rewrote it in standard English they’d reconsider publishing it. But I just don’t think it would have worked! The first line of the book is ‘Ma da’s got bad feet.’ Imagine if I’d written something like: ‘My father’s feet are badly deformed.’ I'm cackling here!
    
5. Tell many stories...
   
   Duck Feet was supposed to be one short story about a wee girl who’d started high school and was learning how to swim. But I enjoyed Kirsty’s voice so much I wrote a second story about her learning French. Then one about social dancing. After that, I cycled through the different subjects I thought she’d take – it wasn't until I’d done about ten or twelve stories I thought, ‘Ok, maybe this is a whole book.’
   
   That’s when I started interviewing people. Some had gone to school with me or my sister, others were pals my age or a bit older who went to different Scottish high schools; my youngest interviewee was thirteen. Everyone was very generous with their time and keen to talk, and soon I saw patterns emerging within the memories they were sharing – regardless of where or when folk had gone to high school they all had similar stories: there was always your best pal, your worst enemy, the teacher you didn’t get on with, the class clown, the popular girl, the popular boy, the wee person that everyone said smelled... the only things that’d changed were technology and politics!
   
   I initially ended up with sixty-five linked short stories. But although I had some success publishing them in different literary magazines, no-one wanted the whole manuscript. It was sixteen years later that Monstrous Regiment approached me and asked if I could novelise it!
    
6. ...but weave them all together
   
   Turning those stories into a novel was a massive learning curve, because I then had to start from page one again: I had to sit down and go: ‘Okay, I've got all these individual stories that take place over six years of high school, but what is Kirsty Campbell’s overarching story? What is it that she really wants?’ Once I figured those things out, I knew what the ending was going to be. 
   
   (Originally, the sixty-fifth story was about Kirsty waiting on her exam results, but I was never satisfied with it. And I’m really pleased that my editor, Ellen Desmond, pushed me to dig deeper.) But it was really, really hard at times: I had to let go of stories that didn’t work within the larger narrative; and I had to find through-lines for all main characters and their individual journeys – and I had to decide who the main characters were because I had so many of them that they couldn’t all be the centre of attention! The final draft was seventy chapters long and twenty thousand words longer than my publishers were expecting.
    
7. Try writing a timeline
   
   The timeline. There wasn’t much of one when it was just individual stories, and I think it took me about a month (at least) to go back and unpick what happened and when. And at one point I got carried away with what I was doing, and I mapped out Kirsty’s whole timetable for first year and what classes she had during which periods on specific days of the week!
   
   I want to say I’ll definitely do this differently going forward. But I know what I’m like. I recently got caught up in trying to figure out my narrator’s work rota for my current work-in-progress - I think I wasted about an hour writing down all his colleagues shift patterns for October and November of 2007, when I finally realised how ridiculous I was being because none of that stuff was ever making it into the novel!
    
8. Be proud of what you've done 
   
   Duck Feet being named Scotland’s Book Of The Year was (and still is) the biggest highlight of my writing career. But there was also the text my mum sent that I put on social media which said: ‘Just finished Duck Feet. Pure dead brilliant. You really smashed it’. And there have been so many times when other folk who live or grew up in Renfrew have messaged me or my publishers and said the book had really resonated with them. 
   
   Maybe it should just be that I believed in the manuscript and stuck to my guns for all those years and kept sending it out.

Ely Percy is an award winning Scottish writer, perhaps best known for their novel Duck Feet. Their first publication was a letter-cum-poem in Big! magazine in 1994. Since then, they’ve released a memoir Cracked: Recovering After Traumatic Brain Injury, graduated with distinction from Glasgow University’s MPhil in Creative Writing and contributed over fifty short stories to literary journals including New Writing Scotland, Scotsman,Orange and Edinburgh Review. 

Percy’s debut novel Vicky Romeo Plus Joolz was published in March 2019 by Knight Errant Press. Their second novel Duck Feet came out on March 2021 and won The Saltire Society's Scottish Fiction Book of the Year in November of the same year.