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.