Anne, like the others, finds it difficult hiding in the Secret Annex. They can never go outside, and always have to be careful. It's very tense. Anne uses her diary to get her frustrations off her chest.
Anne doesn’t just keep a diary during her time in the Secret Annex. She also writes short stories and collects her favourite sentences by other writers in a notebook. Anne hopes for her diary to be published as a novel after the war. That’s why she starts rewriting it. But Anne never manages to finish it. She's discovered and arrested before she completes her work.
The diary becomes even more imporant to Anne during the hiding period, because she can entrust it with her innermost thoughts. On March 16, 1944, she realizes: The nicest part is being able to write down all my thoughts and feelings, otherwise I'd absolutely suffocate.”
The life she leads now is totally different to her previous carefree existence. Anne has a lust for life and it's hard for her to be confined indoors, and forced to be quiet. Her diary helps her.
She dreams of becoming a journalist, and then a famous writer. And if it turns out that she lacks the talent to write books or newspaper articles, she can always just write for her own pleasure, she tells herself. ‘But I want to achieve more than that. I can’t imagine having to live like Mother, Mrs van Pels and all the women who go about their work and are then forgotten. I need to have something besides a husband and children to devote myself to! I don’t want to have lived in vain like most people.’
She keeps track of the birthdays of people belonging to different royal families and spends hours drawing their family trees. Before the war, Anne received postcards of the British Royal family from a cousin in England. In her room in the Secret Annex, she pastes her favorite images of Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret on the wall above her desk.
Immediately after the Frank family takes up residence in the Secret Annex,
Anne pastes all sorts of magazine clippings and postcards on the walls of her room. While hiding in the Secret Annex, Anne regularly spends time working on her photo collection. She finds it boring to have to look at the same images all the time. “Yesterday I put up some more film stars in my room but this time with photo corners so I can take them down again.”
“Our little room looked very bare at first with nothing on the walls; but thanks to Daddy who had brought my film-star collection and picture postcards on beforehand, and with the aid of a paste pot and brush, I have transformed the walls into one gigantic picture. This makes it look much more cheerful…” (The Diary of Anne Frank, July 11, 1942)