Snapshots of moments that will never come around again

Author Karl Whitney examines how passing time shapes his writing as he sifts through the raw material of his notes to select the fragments that need to be gathered and pieced together to create a story

Karl Whitney on editing your own work: 'You splurge it all on the page and then go back and tidy it up.'

My father, who died almost two years ago, often had a camera in his hand. 

The one I remember best was a Canon Snappy 50, a black plastic model whose relative heft lent it, at least to my mind, the sturdy quality of a piece of military hardware. 

He had bought it to replace a Kodak Instamatic camera that he had used in the 1970s and early ‘80s, and it was a significant step up.

This Christmas, for the first time since his death, my family sat and sorted through the photos he had taken. It was like seeing the world through his eyes. 

Every so often a photo would trigger a story, and the gaps between the photos would be filled in — the mystery of why I was sitting on a donkey or holding a chicken under my arm, say. (Our summer holidays were often spent in holiday accommodation on the Hegartys’ farm in Ahakista, West Cork.) 

The photos were fragments, or documents, of a wider reality that could only now be retrieved through narration.

A week after looking at those photos, I was sitting at my desk reading through a copybook — like an exercise book I would have used in primary school — in which I had taken notes about my everyday life during the summer of 2021. 

When revisiting these notes, which resembled a diary, I was confronted with an experience that was comparable to the one I underwent when sorting through the photos: I was forced to reinterpret the material, to fill in the gaps, to complete the context.

One of the truisms of writing advice — that all writing is rewriting — can be useful when dealing with your own notes. 

The self in the photos from the 1980s is not the same self who is gazing at them in 2024; the writer who took notes in 2021 is not the same one who’s trying to make sense of them almost three years later. 

Leafing through the copybook, it occurred to me that the gap between the two moments of writing could, in a way, become the story.

Had I transcribed those notes in 2021 and tried to make something of them, I’m not sure I could have. 

They reported daily events blankly or neglected to record significant details. They strove to ascribe significance where there was none. 

But I found as I read through them that distance had a way of making those hastily scribbled messages from the past more understandable.

As a writer, you’re used to thinking of revision as something that begins when you have a complete draft written. 

In short: you splurge it all on the page and then go back and tidy it up. 

As I looked at my old notes, though, I found myself picking out elements that interested me, and rejecting anything that didn’t, as if I was revising my initial thoughts and editing them into something that made more sense.

It also resembled the kind of interpretative method you need as a historian when you open a box of documents in an archive. 

You might broadly know what you might find in that archival box — a sheaf of official documents, a diary, notes for a speech that you’ve read elsewhere in published form — yet you dutifully sift through it in case something sparks your interest.

Perhaps a detail will jump out at you: a turn of phrase in a letter or in their notes might reveal something of the character of the person you’re investigating. 

We’re bodies moving through space and time, and minds grappling inadequately with the problems of the moment. The traces we leave behind can give some idea of what that struggle was like.

I suppose what I’m really talking about is how you might critically appraise material, whether connected to your own life or the lives of others, and what you might do with it next. T

he creation of distance is important, and time can help. You let go, become less insistent on your own personal narrative, and instead coolly appraise it, contextualise it, see your own story as part of something larger. 

Your own words can become an archival source, in other words, and you might very well return to them to solve the question of who you were.

My renewed focus on the interpretative part of the research process led me to think about the work I’ve published in the past. 

What method did I use when writing about other people? And would it be possible to adapt this method if I decided to use the notes I made about my own life as a research source?

When leafing through my copybook a sentence caught my attention — not because it was particularly stylish or memorable (it was merely remarking on the loneliness you feel as a cyclist when you crash and there’s no one there to help you) but because it appeared to reveal the emotional context underpinning the moment at which I had been writing.

I had taken those notes — the raw material I hoped would be turned into an article, or a book, even — thinking the material was about one thing (the days I spent in Dublin meeting up with friends and cycling around the city). 

But, revisiting them with the benefit of hindsight, they seemed to have a greater, deeper meaning: a snapshot taken of a moment that will never come again. 

The experience of believing, during the research process, that a piece of writing is about one thing, then later, when you come to review it, deciding that it’s about something else, is not unknown to me.

Sometimes, I’ll plan a piece of work carefully and the finished product will closely resemble that plan. But at other times I need to gather piles of material before deciding what the focus will be. 

The latter approach requires decisions later in the process that help to reshape raw material into something more coherent. 

Perhaps you might say that this is the creative part of creative non-fiction.

When working on material that would become a chapter in my first book, I met up with an archaeologist, Franc Myles, and walked around the Liberties, an area of Dublin south-west of the city centre that has a long and interesting history. 

Essentially it was a guided walk with an emphasis on the historical fabric of the city — both the things you could see and what was hidden beneath. (For the latter, I had to rely on Franc’s experience of archaeological digs in the area.) 

I recorded our conversation on a dictaphone as we walked and subsequently transcribed it. When I looked at what we had talked about, I knew it had to be narrowed down — that I would have to comb through what I had, edit it down, and give it a thematic focus retrospectively.

After transcribing the dialogue, I printed the document and went through it with a pencil, marking parts of interest that I might use in a finished piece. 

Months had passed since the walk took place. By now I was better able to treat the dialogue as one element amongst others, which included my own notes that I took as we walked, my observations of Franc and the places we visited, and the research I had done into the subject. 

This could now be reshaped into a focused essay that attempted to capture an archaeologist’s view of the city.

Spending the best part of a year engaging in a process of transcription, interpretation, and rewriting (and, ultimately, thinking about what I had and how best to present it) enabled me to make sense of what might have otherwise remained scattered fragments that failed to fully cohere. Time helped shape the story.