My brother Barry and his family lived for several years on the French island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean. While there he wrote a great many letters home. Barry is a natural raconteur and he could make a report on his trip by bicycle to get groceries into an epic journey of great hilarity. I think the letters he sent to me must have been in the last box I unpacked after we moved to Victoria in 1993, because I didn't find them until about 1999, at which time they jumped out of the box, scolding me for neglect. They demanded to become a book.
The rest of the family - our mother, brother David and sister Mary were asked for all letters from Reunion which they had saved, and I transcribed them in date order into the computer, along with the content of Barry's notebook of that period of his life. After a preliminary round of proofreading, I sent a printout of the draft to Barry for his consideration.
People have many styles of letter-writing (and email posting for that matter) with two major categories of content - the physical landscape and the mental landscape. In addition, people select two different time frames for the content of their letters. One time frame will be "What I wrote to you since I last wrote" in other words, catching you up with my life; the other will be, "What is going on in my physical environment and my mental landscape NOW, as I write."
Barry's letters included the content of both landscapes, but his time frame was NOT to catch up his addressee with what had been going on since he last wrote to that person, but rather the events and thoughts of TODAY.
In consequence, when he read my transcript of his collected letters, he saw enormous gaps in the overall STORY of his experience on Reunion. The gaps would not exist if ALL of his letters had been preserved, but many, perhaps half, were sent to friends, hence not included in my transcript.
The transcript was sent to Barry several years before he retired. He said he needed to write a narrative to fill in the gaps left by the exclusion of the letters to friends, and indeed of the letters to family which did not come into my hands. But, he said, this task would have to wait until he retired.
Barry retired in 2004, and discovered what many retirees do, which is that he is busier than when he worked. I'm still waiting.