Write in Your Journal Like Anaïs Nin: 4 New Approaches to Try
What started as a letter from an 11-year-old girl to her absent father became a lifelong project of self-discovery. Anaïs Nin’s extensive diaries were an attempt to capture the world in such a way that they would persuade her father to return. She continued The Diaries for her entire life as a prolific chronicle of her complex relationships, her innermost thoughts and experiences, and a study of her unique and fluid novelistic style.
For decades, Anaïs Nin’s diaries were private, allowing space to explore herself uncensored (though she shared her diaries occasionally with trusted friends). She began revising and publishing The Diaries in 1966. There are now seven published volumes that span her lifetime, and four volumes of early diaries that were published after her death.
In The Diaries, inner and outer worlds blurred. Anaïs wanted to know herself, placing an emphasis on her internal landscape and an intimate excavation of the soul. Her style is a celebration of beauty, free association, emotion, and spontaneity.
Bring the techniques of Anaïs into your practice to develop an intimate connection with the self:
1. Make “Word Portraits”
2. Ask Questions (Seek Your Interior Fatality)
3. Obey the Impulse
4. Write about Writing
Make “Word Portraits”
Relationships shape our existence. Encounters with others are defining. Composing “word portraits” reveals as much about ourselves as the people we’re describing–what we observe about others, how they impact us, how we change through mutual impact on one another, and our unfolding stories.
Anaïs wrote vivid portraits of the people she encountered throughout her life, placing emphasis on capturing their secret, inner selves, feelings which often evade description. She did not shy away from her subjective experience of a person, but described it openly.
Write in Your Journal Like Audre Lorde: 4 Ways In
A woman whose work became even more urgent in the face of cancer diagnoses, Audre Lorde wrote in her journals to clarify and declare what actually mattered—why live? In answering this question for herself, she also discovered that her approach to cancer was no different from her approach to living, writing, and loving. She went into battle with cancer just as she showed up in every other area of her life, voicing urgent truths in order to not regret her silences.
While many writers have published their journals (Anaïs Nin being perhaps the most famous) Lorde published only excerpts from her journals in two works: The Cancer Journals and A Burst of Light and Other Essays. For now, Lorde’s journals remain unpublished and archived at Spelman College in the Audre Lorde Collection (they span the years 1950 to 1992).
Don’t assume that it was always easy for Lorde to turn to her journal as an excuse to back away from your writing practice. It’s not always simple:
“I wanted to write in my journal but couldn’t bring myself to. There are so many shades to what passed through me in those days. And I would shrink from committing myself to paper because the light would change before the word was out, the ink was dry.”
Take inspiration from Lorde, discover new awareness and depth in your self-honesty, and engage with your journal writing practice by experimenting with these four ways in:
1. Talk to Ghosts
2. Be Outraged
3. Speak Today’s Truth
4. Voice the Body
1. Talk to Ghosts
Appeal to the dead—whether a childhood friend, lovers, mentor, dead grandfather, or anyone who lives in your heart, dead or alive. It can be someone living at a remove, who belongs to the past, whether lost to distance or circumstances. What do you need to tell them? What did you never dare ask? Ask now.
Write in Your Journal Like Stanley Hayami: 5 Approaches to Try
Behind barbed wire on American soil, LA native Stanley Hayami wrote for himself alone, filling journal pages never meant for anyone’s eyes. We can honor him by learning from his journal entries and his approach to writing.
Stanley kept a diary before his life was upended by forced internment in a concentration camp with his family and other Japanese Americans from 1942 to 1944. His practice continued during his Heart Mountain internment camp days. Those journals reveal resilience, frustration, and hope.
His writing voice is both intimate and clear-eyed. He really noticed the world around him—people, places, ordinary moments—modestly tucking his own views into the gaps between the details.
You can bring Stanley’s approach into your own practice:
1. Document life inside and around you.
2. Embody humility.
3. Show respect.
4. Draw what words cannot say.
5. Make lists.
1. Document life inside and around you
Vast and varied occurrences mark a day—big, mundane, pleasant, and unpleasant things. In just a sentence or two on a page, encapsulate the heart of an event.
Hayami recorded it all, from a blackout in the concentration camp where he was imprisoned to an irritating Algebra teacher—
“Man did my Algebra teacher give us some tough problems.”