Diaries, like personal growth, are forever a work in progress

Documenting the great and small moments in your every day life serves many purposes, even — perhaps especially — when it’s not for publication, writes Karl Whitney

I come across a note I took in early January, just after I had been walking late at night on a thin layer of snow that crunched beneath my feet. 

I’VE COME to believe that one of the most valuable aspects of writing is that you can record what was it like to be alive at a certain time and in a certain place. If it all ends tomorrow, at least there’ll be notes.

The first draft of my observations I keep in a notetaking app on my phone, alongside other assorted jottings that most often include my grocery list: There, accounts of half-remembered dreams mingle with personal exhortations to buy coffee beans and toilet roll.

I wouldn’t call what I’m writing a diary, but in a way, I suppose, it is. It’s scattered digitally here and there; in this way it resembles life as we live it now. I do have a physical desk diary that functions as a to-do list: Be here for an event, write a few hundred words on a certain topic. But any subjective experiences typically go elsewhere, in digital notes or one of my physical notebooks, or into a folder on my computer where I keep reflective pieces I’ve written.

Writers conduct an ongoing conversation with themselves, only some of which ends up on the page. The notes, observations, diaries, constitute traces of that conversation. Much of it wouldn’t be particularly compelling to a reader, but it is an important element of a writer’s daily practice.

Frankly, you need to let the demons out. Having thoughts circle around your head with nowhere to tether them can distract you. Writing them down means you can shape them, analyse them, come to terms with them — or simply forget them.

Karl Whitney: 'Writers conduct an ongoing conversation with themselves, only some of which ends up on a page.'

I tend to use this form of writing as a means of staying in shape, giving me a regular writing routine when I may not be working on anything for publication. It has the added benefit of encouraging my powers of observation: I keep an eye out for anything interesting that might come in useful in the future.

Scrolling through my phone, I come across a note I took in early January, just after I had been walking late at night on a thin layer of snow that crunched beneath my feet. Few pedestrians passed me. There was little traffic and the snow had the strange effect of dampening noises nearby while rendering distant noises clear as a bell.

The roads were icy. I heard a car brake suddenly a few streets away, perhaps on the dual carriageway. Then I heard a sinister silence, followed by the muffled thump of what I believed to be a collision. I pictured the event unfolding: A car travelling too fast, the brake applied, then the low rumble of an out-of-control vehicle on a slippery surface, followed by the catastrophe of an unavoidable impact.

It may well have happened that way, but I didn’t witness it. I just connected the noises together and imagined what they might signify. As I walked, I thought about whether I should believe my own imagination.

Maybe the noises were caused by separate incidents, and I sought to impose upon them a form, one that connected them together in a neat way. It’s possible. Sometimes we tell a story about events that’s only tangentially related to what occurred.

But what mattered to me was that I had imagined it while walking, and the fact that I did told me something about the atmosphere of the snowy night and how I pictured the world beyond my line of vision. The beauty and strangeness of snow was accompanied by the threat of accident.

There’s room for imagination in your diary; it doesn’t merely have to be a recounting of events as you witness them. The inner experience is important. We have imaginative lives that are shaped by — and, in turn, shape — the everyday lives we live. The imaginative and the everyday can be as intertwined as the dream diary and the shopping list in my notes app. Separating them, analysing them, and making something of them is a compelling part of the work of the writer.

Recently I was on a panel that discussed the theme of letters to one’s younger self. If you could go back in time to provide advice to a younger version of yourself, what would that advice be?

There’s some relatively obvious advice that can be passed on. For example, that persistence is the key; that one develops as a writer only through writing.

I found the central idea slightly dubious. It depends on what kind of a person you imagine your younger self to be, and who you think you are now. Both are fluid.

The prompt makes stringent demands of one’s self-perception. Do you now truly know yourself well enough to dish out wisdom? The person you now imagine yourself to be is providing advice to the person you guess you once were. It’s fraught with pitfalls.

One’s self changes almost imperceptibly from day to day — something you can make sense of, track even, through writing. Written selves can be truthful or deceptive (to others and to themselves) but at their best are a genuine, albeit imperfect, attempt to wrestle with the complexities of being alive.

If I wanted to know who I was when I was 15, say, I could point to the bigger life events of that age. But on a day-to-day level I don’t really have anything to draw on: Vague memories rarely tethered to specific moments.

If I kept a diary back then, I’d be willing to bet that it would have been unrevealing: I didn’t yet have the tools to write coherently or analytically about my experiences. Writing was associated, quite negatively, with schoolwork and little else. 

Now, writing is a constant part of my life. The self is archived in the notes I take: The observations I make and the feelings I share with the page. What’s most important is the practice, the habit of staying sharp through writing. And if what you’re writing isn’t intended for publication you can loosen up a bit.

Sense of uncertainty can be communicated

THE Australian author Helen Garner’s collected diaries, published last year in Ireland and the UK under the title How to End a Story (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, £20 GBP), won the 2025 Bailie-Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction.

I must admit that I was sceptical about an author’s diaries winning a prize intended to reward the art of non-fiction. Typically, the winner would be a big, slightly pompous book that explains one of the world’s problems, even if it doesn’t offer solutions to them. But the problems faced by the world right now seem intractable and scary; so-called serious non-fiction no longer feels like much of a cure.

In such moments of public crisis our lives are often lived more privately. Perhaps a more intimate form of non-fiction, such as the diary, chimes more closely with this era of personal withdrawal. Or maybe it simply provides a non-fictional analogue to what we often seek from fiction: The vicarious experience of the lives of others.

Garner’s book is undoubtedly a work of literature. You can see it in the sharpness of her descriptions, in each small anecdote carefully composed. She observes her own life with writerly detachment. But it’s also a useful document of the life of a writer: The financial uncertainty, the artistic successes and failures, the bad reviews, the sense of blindly stumbling forward in time without knowing what might come next.

Ultimately, the diary’s strength is that a sense of uncertainty can be communicated. The personal form of writing typified by — but not limited to — the diary reveals the self as something fragile, constantly in the process of formation, decay, and reformation. One revises oneself daily, repeatedly — as one would a piece of writing.

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