On Writing

Where the 1946 pamphlet argued with reviewers, this one talks to writers. Nin describes the method the diary had taught her: the entry written hot, the image trusted before it is understood, the distinction between writing that records and writing that discovers. The essay's advice runs against the era's workshop wisdom — plan less, explain less, keep the temperature — and toward the practice her students and lecture audiences would press her about for the next thirty years.

Issued in 1947 in the same little-pamphlet culture as its predecessor, it survived the format: the text was folded into her later essay collections, and its phrases about writing from the unconscious became fixtures of her lectures and of A Woman Speaks. As a pair, the two pamphlets are the continuous novel's theory — one negative, one positive — written while the novels themselves were appearing.

A working credo in brief: the unconscious as source, the diary as training ground, intuition as discipline rather than indulgence, and revision as the pursuit of intensity. Nin illustrates from her own practice — how the fiction grows out of the journal's images — and addresses the young writer directly, in the voice her later lecture years made famous.