I want to write, but more than that, I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried deep in my heart.

Anne Frank’s diary is so famous that you’ve probably heard of it or read it before. Today, I challenge you today to look at Anne with fresh eyes. As you read this I want you to imagine that she is a brand new thirteen-year-old, alive and online and writing today.

Saturday, 20 June 1942

I haven’t written for a few days, because I wanted first of all to think about my diary. It’s an odd idea for someone like me to keep a diary; not only because I have never done so before, but because it seems to me that neither I – nor for that matter anyone else – would be interested in the unbosomings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl. Still, what does that matter? I want to write, but more than that, I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried deep in my heart.

There is a saying that “paper is more patient than man”; it came back to me on one of my slightly melancholy days, while I sat chin in hand, feeling too bored and limp even to make up my mind whether to go out or stay home. Yes, there is no doubt that paper is patient and as I don’t intend to show this cardboard-covered notebook bearing the proud name of “diary,” to anyone, unless I find a real friend, boy or girl, probably nobody cares. And now I come to the root of the matter, the reason for starting my diary: it is that I have no real friend.

by Anne Frank (June 1929 – March 1945)
from The Diary of a Young Girl
image: Wikipedia

Thoughts About Anne Frank’s Writing

When Anne Frank and her companions were taken away to concentration camps, Anne was in the midst of rewriting her diary entries. She’d heard that a collection of diaries and “everyday material” would be published after the war. She produced an average of four handwritten pages each and every day of her last ten months in hiding. Some was fresh material, and some was re-working what she’d already written during her first two years in the “secret annex.” She wrote like a successful blogger – regularly, in quantity, with focus and over a long period of time.

If Anne was writing today, would she be a blogger? If not, do you think that the slower pace of initially writing for private use is a necessary part of distilling what is best offered up for publication? Or, would the added possibility of immediate viewing by the outside world be an exciting enticement to write more, and would that quantity translate into quality?

Would she write like an activist? Would she go in the opposite direction and want to melt into a pretended normalcy by creating an anonymous MySpace-type page? (I shudder to imagine a hot_anne2553.) Would she be more constrained about critiquing her family and housemates?

Wishes

I like to imagine that she’d pull together her regular girl self and her erudite teen-in-impossible-situation side, and write pretty much as she wrote in the 1940′s, but more so. As long as I’m wishing, I’d give her a guardian web fairy who’d shield her location and web host from prying persecutors, and I’d grant her with built-in marketing smarts to help her be seen and linked to. I’d want her not to be too distracted by wondering if anyone was reading, what kinds of comments she’d get (or not,) or how many readers were “friending” or subscribing. And, I’d give her instant translations from Dutch to English or whatever would be most read or needed.

That’s a lot to wish for! In the first place, someone with an Anne-like life would need to be in a place where they can have regular access to technology, and make use of it — to be a literate refugee with a way to get online on a regular basis, and also be an exceptional teenager.

Tags: Writing
Posted in Anne Frank

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