Karl Whitney: Hitting ‘no changes’ when, in truth, almost everything has changed

Reviewing work can be a window into another moment in time, in our lives, and an opportunity to examine how old words can take on new meaning

Vacant pub in Swinton, ‘The Football’, with boarded windows on a quiet street; one of the decaying estate pubs that dot suburban Manchester.

Recently I was rereading something I had written quite a long time ago — perhaps 14 years or more. 

The aim was merely to check it for any spelling errors or other typographical misprints, as the piece had been published in a couple of forms in the past and was about to be published again.

(It’s titled 'The Hidden Rivers of the Liberties', just published in Dublin: Written in our Hearts, an anthology edited by Declan Meade that is this year’s One Dublin One Book selection.)

Once a book has been typeset from a digital source (usually a Word document or equivalent) the author gets a copy to check. 

This is the last time an author will see their work before it ends up in print (often things can be changed from the print, or galley, proofs before the book hits the shelves — but sometimes not, depending on budgets and time constraints).

When I went back to this piece that was written almost a decade-and-a-half ago, it wasn’t a case of picking out mistakes. 

The material had already been through the publication process several times. 

Sometimes taking text from one document and setting it into another can result in glitches that require a proofread, so I dutifully kept an eye out.

What occurred to me as I read was that this piece had been written by another writer. 

If I was to write it today it would be quite distinct, right down to word choice and sentence structure.

It’s not just a case that the subject of the essay had changed over the years — it was written a few years into the economic crash, when construction had halted, and the zone of the city on which the piece focused has been altered significantly since then.

Holding a pencil over the page, I had to fight the urge to rewrite it on a sentence by sentence level — but that wasn’t the job I was required to carry out. 

My hands were tied. Eventually, I finished reading, put the pencil away and sent an email saying ‘no changes’.

That feeling of being surprised by what I had written all those years before stuck with me. 

Writing is such a slow process, and it can be difficult to discern any revolutionary changes in your work as you progress.

In fact, progress seems to emerge from a sense of circularity — doing the same thing, essentially, day after day for months or years — that you can convince yourself that you’re not moving forwards at all.

Was my surprise at being confronted with my earlier work a sign that progress had taken place?

Perhaps. Or had I become a different person in that decade-and-a-half, and my approach to writing had consequently changed? 

Just after the initial research for the essay (which then became a chapter in my first book, Hidden City) had taken place, I was living in Paris, transcribing the dialogue I had recorded when walking around the city, and shaping it into something that I felt worked as a piece of non-fiction writing.

Subsequently I was back in Dublin, writing what became my debut book, and then I was gone again, in the UK for many years, looking for new things to write about that were unfamiliar but that I felt I could make my own: The aerial walkways that go between buildings in Newcastle-upon-Tyne; an underground fire beneath a golf course in Gateshead; the decaying estate pubs that dot suburban Manchester.

These pieces were all written for a variety of publications with different requirements and taught me to consider the distinct audiences I was writing for, and that one can do it while following your own interests as long as you communicate those interests compellingly to the readers.

You take them with you.

One of the ways you can do this, as I’ve written before, is to find a point of connection with the subject. 

The Poddle river, which flows beneath the streets of the Liberties area of Dublin, was channelled through a field next to my primary school in Tallaght. 

It was a tangible physical and historical entwinement with the centre of the city that my far-flung childhood suburb otherwise lacked.

It wasn’t such a leap to connect the Manchester suburbs I strolled around to Tallaght, but, when it comes to writing in greater depth about a subject, sometimes it’s useful to find a guide who will help you to step back and depict their viewpoint rather than your own. 

You might feel a connection to the subject but that may not be enough to make something come alive in the way that you’d like. That’s where another voice, or voices, come in.

Now, though, sitting there reading the proofs, it seemed like the voice I had when I wrote the essay had changed significantly. 

Why else would the pencil I held in 2025 hover above the page, itching to make corrections?

The launch of the anthology in which the essay appears took place on a sunny spring day in central Dublin. 

A group of writers whose work is published in the book gathered for a photo call, and in between poses chatted about their writing, and it was clear that some pieces aside from mine dated back a few years too.

Concerns about revisiting old work

Later in the day, I shared my concerns about revisiting old work with another writer. 

“Maybe we’ve just got better at writing?”, I wondered aloud — but not too loud, lest it be overheard and laughed at — yet part of me considered whether the truth was something stranger.

We write what we write in a context that is beyond our control. 

What’s popular this year may not appeal in the future, and we just have to trust our instincts and pursue what feels right.

When I wrote Hidden City, it felt like the issues it focused on and the approaches that I took during its composition were out there in the world to be toyed with and reconfigured into a book that I still feel is wholly my own. 

I can now also acknowledge it as a product of a certain place and a certain time.

A writer writes in circumstances that aren’t particularly of their choosing, responding to the debates and realities of the era. 

In a way, the work is a snapshot of a moment that, if they return to it, might feel as distant as an old photo.

It may not be a case of the writer getting better or worse — rather that the writer is experiencing the unfamiliarity one might feel when confronted with an isolated shard of a once rich past.

This is how things once were but are not now. This is what you once thought but do not now. This is what a place looked like but does not anymore. 

At the time I wrote the essay, it was charged with the kind of feelings one imbues in words on a page to make them come alive.

But once the writing is done, you hand the job on to the reader, who will either experience something similar to that you gave the work — or will not. 

You might read from the book in front of an audience for a while when it’s published, but over time it will be put away on a shelf or in a box under your bed.

Then, when you return to it, as I did recently, you’ll feel something different: The unnerving experience of now staring then in the face.

 The gap in time is bridged briefly if imperfectly. The best thing to do is to put away the pencil and send an email saying ‘no changes’. Now it’s up to the reader to experience things on your behalf.

• Dublin: Written in our Hearts, edited by Declan Meade, is out now, published by The Stinging Fly.
• For information about the book and details of the One Dublin One Book events during April, go to www.onedublinonebook.ie

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