This is The Write Now Podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 51: Should I Use A Pen Name?

Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps aspiring writers and all the writers to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I am your host, Sarah Werner, and I am having one of those days where I just don’t feel interesting. Maybe you feel like this sometimes, or a lot of the time, or all the time. I hope not all the time, because I can assure you that you’re a lot more interesting than you think you are. But I’m having one of those days where if you asked me, “Hey, Sarah, what’s going on?” Or, “What’s new, Sarah?” I would just kind of shrug my shoulders and go, “I don’t know.” Because while life is no less full than usual, I think I don’t have any new ways to talk about what’s going on.

And as a writer, I think that really bothers me because you could ask, “Hey Sarah, how are you doing?” Or, “What’s new?” And I would respond, “Well, I am podcasting. I’m working full time. I’m trying to write my novel. I’m writing for Forbes. I have blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And you’d get really bored because it would be the same thing that I told you last week, or maybe yesterday, or two weeks ago, or two days ago, et cetera. I don’t know where I’m going with this other than I wish I could ask you how you’re doing because I’m sure you would say something incredibly riveting and interesting like, “Oh, yeah. I just got back from a year in the desert where I lived with the lizards and wrote 12 books. And now, I’m wearing the skull on my head. How awesome is that?”

Like, “Yeah, I got up early and I went to the coffee house this morning and I wrote. And I drank coffee and went to work and did some work and had a salad for lunch because I’m on a diet, had some client calls at work, solved some problems, came home. It’s still snowing outside.” I don’t remember which novel this is from. In fact, maybe it’s not from one of the novels, but from her letters. But Jane Austen has this phrase that stuck with me for years and years.

And it’s something about life being a quick succession of busy nothings, which is really what things have felt like lately. I read a lot of fantasy, and science fiction, urban fantasy, and mystery novels, and I always feel like in those books, life is just packed to the gills with crazy happenings. There’s literally never a dull moment. There’s never a break in the action where the character goes to use the bathroom or calls her mother or settles in for a two hour long legal debriefing. It’s always like, “Action, action, action, brief pause to sleep and or reflect and or have a romance scene.” And then, “Action, action, action, action.”

So I guess where I’m going with this is A, I’m having one of those days. B, how lame is it that I’m doing the same old same old, and yet I’m still exhausted. And C, when will life begin to imitate art? When do I get to go on my space adventure? Okay. Believe it or not, I’m going to tie this rambling introduction into today’s theme. You ready? So I’m talking about these mystery novels and sci-fi and everything in which there’s just always something crazy going on. And I was thinking about this because I’m reading a mystery right now called Career of Evil, which is the third installment in a series. So far, there’s only three books, I think, starring Detective Cormoran Strike, written by author Robert Galbraith. What I did not know when I picked up the first book in the series called The Cuckoo’s Calling was that Robert Galbraith was a pen name for J.K. Rowling. That’s right, the author who wrote the Harry Potter novels.

That pretty much blew my mind when I found out that they were the same person, and I found myself thinking, “Why on earth would this ridiculously popular, wealthy, amazing writer hide her identity for this mystery series.” And that’s one of the questions we’re going to answer in today’s episode which is entitled, Should I Use a Pen Name? Okay. That’s not the only reason that I am recording this episode this week. In fact, this was really strange, but I got not one but two emails from listeners this week asking for advice on whether or not to use a pen name. And then a third emailed and mentioned that they were thinking of writing under a pen name. And I was like, “Okay, that’s just too much coincidence.” This is something that writers are thinking about and so, I’d like to do an episode about it.

So here goes nothing or, well, I guess technically here goes something because I did plan a few things for this episode, so there is substance here. I promise. All right, to start things off, I’m going to answer a very simple and basic question and that is, what is a pen name? And very simply, a pen name is a name that an author uses when they don’t want to publish something under their real name. This is also called a pseudonym, literally translated as false name. Or if you lean toward the French, and I’m going to pronounce this horribly wrong, nom de guerre, which translates to name of war, I believe, because originally French soldiers enlisted and then had special war names back a couple hundred years ago.

This was later sort of changed or back translated to nom de plume, which the English wanted to use because they weren’t comfortable saying nom de guerre, which means name of war. And so they’re like, “Oh, name of the feather, name of the pen, pen name.” And so, it’s called any of these things today, pen names, pseudonym, nom de plume, nom de guerre. Again, I apologize for my horrible pronunciation. I am very good at English and very bad at any other language. So with that in mind, here comes a very easy trivia question and that is what do all of these names have in common, Mark Twain, George Eliot, Richard Bachman, J.K. Rowling, Cassandra Clare, Lemony Snicket, and Carolyn Keene? None of them actually exist. That is to say, these are all pen names. And this is by no means a comprehensive list. There are hundreds of pen names for different authors, and I will link to them in the show notes for today’s episode. Benjamin Franklin actually wrote under a bunch of different pen names and they were all very silly sounding like, oh, Sophia Good Manners and things like that.

If that interests you, you can check out the link in the show notes for today’s episode, episode number 51. And for me, there’s two very different points of fascination when it comes to pen names. And that’s number one, why is the author using a pen name. And number two, why did they choose the pen name that they did? I’m going to briefly tell you the stories of the eight pen names that I just listed. And then we’re going to dig in why people use pen names, things you should consider before using a pen name, how to select a pen name if that’s something you’re interested in doing, and then whether or not you should use a pen name.

All right, I’m going to start with one of the most famous examples and that is Mark Twain, whose actual given name is Samuel Clemens. There’s a lot of different theories about where the phrase Mark Twain came from, one of which was the one I learned in school and that was, it was something that people on riverboats used to shout. And Samuel Clemens spent many, many years of his life working on Mississippi River boats. And the phrase they would yell is, “By the Mark Twain,” I guess. The mark was a technical term, I suppose, some sort of measurement for river boating. And then twain means two, which serves very well as a pen name because it speaks to the dual nature of the author and et cetera, et cetera. But then I dug up this passage from Mark Twain’s autobiography in which he claims to have taken the pen name Mark Twain from someone else. So here’s a brief passage from that.

Twain writes, “I was a cub pilot on the Mississippi River then. And one day, I wrote a rude and crude satire, which was leveled at captain Isaiah Sellers, the oldest steam boat pilot on the Mississippi River and the most respected, esteemed, and revered. For many years, he had occasionally written brief paragraphs concerning the river and the changes which it had undergone under his observation during 50 years and had signed these paragraphs Mark Twain and published them in the St. Louis and New Orleans journals. In my satire, I made a rude game of his reminiscences. It was a shabby poor performance, but I didn’t know and the pilots didn’t know it. They thought it was brilliant. They were jealous of Sellers because when the gray heads among them pleased their vanity by detailing in the hearing of the younger craftsman marvels which they had seen in the long ago on the river, Sellers was always likely to step in at the psychological moment and snuff them out with wonders of his own, which made their small marvels look pale and sick.”

So essentially, he was a story topper. “However, I have told all about this in old times on the Mississippi. The pilots handed my extravagant satire to a river reporter, and it was published in the New Orleans True Delta. That poor old Captain Sellers was deeply wounded. He had never been held up to ridicule before. He was sensitive and he never got over the hurt, which I had wantonly and stupidly inflicted upon his dignity. I was proud of my performance for a while and considered it quite wonderful, but I have changed my opinion of it long ago. Sellers never published another paragraph nor ever used his nom de guerre again.” Again, that was a passage from The Autobiography of Mark Twain Volume Two published in September of 1906.

Another famous pen name user is one of my personal favorite writers, George Eliot, a Victorian writer who penned, among others, The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch, two of my favorite novels. George Eliot was the pen name of a woman named Mary Ann Evans. And the whole reason she wrote under a pen name and a male pen name was so that she would be taken seriously as a writer. Unfortunately, during the time that George Eliot AKA Mary Ann Evans was writing, in the mid 1800s, there was this stereotype that women could only write lighthearted, silly romances. And George Eliot was interested in writing books of depth and character, not that romances don’t have depth or character, but she wanted to sort of break the stereotype. She didn’t want to be pigeonholed into what was known then as “women’s literature.” There’s also some talk that she had hoped to avoid a scandal, but I shan’t convey that story here.

The third name on the list, Richard Bachman, you might be familiar with. He wrote among other books, a novel that was published in the ’80s called The Running Man, which was later turned into a movie of the same title, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Richard Bachman is actually the pen name of Stephen King, you know, who you might’ve heard of. I don’t know. And so, you might ask yourself, just like J.K. Rowling, why on earth would Stephen King, famous, revered Stephen King publish books under a pen name? Well, at the time when Stephen King was publishing, he got advice from his publishers that people were not likely to take him seriously as a writer or to believe that he had written the books himself if he published more than one book a year. He simply wrote too much, they said. He was simply too prolific to be believed.

And so they said, “You know what? You can keep writing and publishing novels. Just only publish one per year under the name Stephen King.” And he was like, “All right.” So he did. And this is something that many other very prolific writers have done as well. Nora Roberts has done this. Joyce Carol Oates has done this. For me, this is very enviable because, boy, I wish I could write just too much to be believed. Maybe I will one day.

And speaking of J.K. Rowling, she is the next figure on my list because J.K. Rowling is actually a pen name for Joanne Rowling. It’s a subtle difference. And the J actually stands for Joanne, but there’s two small changes here. She added the K, which stood for Kathleen, the name of her paternal grandmother. And the reason that she did this was because of marketing. So when she initially published the first Harry Potter book, publishers didn’t think that boys would buy a book about a boy wizard that was written by a female author. So they advised that she remained anonymous gender wise, and instead publish under initials J.K. Rowling, which could be male or female. This is something that a lot of writers have done, especially if they’re writing from a male or a female point of view.

I remember in eighth grade, we read the outsiders by S.E. Hinton. And I thought for years and years, that S.E. Hinton was a man because the main character’s male, and it’s about a gang. But S.E. Hinton is actually Susan Elizabeth Hinton. And the thought was that nobody’s going to buy a book written by a woman about teenage boys. As to whether or not that’s true, I will not comment.

I mentioned earlier that J.K. Rowling also writes under the pen name Robert Galbraith for a series of mysteries that are intended to appeal to adults. And the reason she did this was sort of to break away from the genre that she had become so well associated with, and that was children’s fantasy literature. And to a degree, that’s understandable. If you saw an intense looking murder mystery but then saw J.K. Rowling’s name on the cover, you’d be like, “What is this? Is this about wizards murdering each other.” When really, no, it’s full of foul language. And it’s very grizzly and gritty and dark. And it’s very, very, very different from what you would assume the author J.K. Rowling would write, so it’s probably smart that she made that distinction, even though later her attorneys leaked that she was actually Robert Galbraith, kind of ruined that.

Next on my list is Cassandra Clare. If you’re into YA literature, or if you’re interested in The Mortal Instruments series, Cassandra Clare is their author. Her real name is Judith Remelt and she actually got her start and started using a pen name by writing fan fiction. I think it’s a pretty common practice in fan fiction to write under a pen name, for a number of different reasons. You might not want people to know that you’re writing fan fiction, or you might be a little bit nervous about a lawsuit, et cetera, et cetera. And so, after she found some success, she decided to keep her pen name.

Next is Lemony Snicket, and you might be familiar with Lemony Snicket if you are a fan of The Series of Unfortunate Events Books. Now, this is a really interesting case. This is very unique. Lemony Snicket is actually Daniel Handler, who is a writer, but Handler created Lemony Snicket not only as a pen name, but as a character, which is super interesting. He writes from the point of view of this character Lemony Snicket, and I think Lemony Snicket even has his own autobiography, which is crazy. This is just a really interesting example of what you can do creatively with a pen name in that sometimes that pen name can become a character in and of itself.

Finally, the last one I’m going to talk briefly about is Carolyn Keene. I grew up reading every single Nancy Drew book I could get my hands on. And my Aunt Ruth gave me a new hardcover Nancy Drew book every year for Christmas, so I very slowly built my collection of Nancy Drew novels. And I grew up just revering Carolyn Keene. Whoever Carolyn Keene was, I wanted to be her because Nancy drew was so cool. I wanted to be Nancy drew too, I guess. So later, when I was in college, I found out that there actually was no such person as Carolyn keen. Carolyn Keene was the pen name that a conglomerate of writers ghost wrote under. So not only was the Nancy Drew series not written by a woman named Carolyn Keene, it was not even written all by one person. There were many, many authors for the different books in the Nancy Drew series all using the pen name Carolyn Keene. And actually interestingly, the same thing is true for The Hardy Boys series, which were written by a pen name, Franklin W. Dixon, which was also an assortment of ghost writers.

Okay, so I’ve just very briefly gone into the stories behind eight different pen names. And the reason I did that was to sort of shed some light on why different authors choose to write under pen names, because there’s not just one reason. Some authors like George Eliot and J.K. Rowling write under a pen name to disguise their gender. Others, again, such as J.K. Rowling writing as Robert Galbraith do so to sort of distance the works they write under one name from the works they write under a different name, especially if they’re writing in two different genres. It’s very easy when you get published to be sort of typecast as the romance author or the fantasy author, when really a lot of authors have more than one type of book in them. Like I say, William Gibson, and you think speculative fiction. And I say, J.K. Rowling and you think Harry Potter.

These writers are capable of more than just those genres to which they’ve attached themselves initially, so sometimes it makes sense for them to use pen names. Also, William Gibson doesn’t use a pen name that I know of. I don’t know why he came into my mind as an example. Some writers choose a pen name simply to make their name more memorable and distinctive like Cassandra Clare. I mean, that’s a fantastic pen name. It’s memorable. It has alliteration. It’s early enough in the alphabet, just in case you don’t have a lot of time to browse the bookstore. Some writers write under pen names to sort of hide their productivity or their prolificness such as Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman. Some writers write under pen names to combine themselves into one fictitious “author”, such as Carolyn Keene or Franklin W. Dixon. I believe there’s also a number of husband and wife teams that do that as well, but I can’t … I’m sorry, I can’t think of them off the top of my head.

Finally, an author might also use a pen name in order to conceal their identity. If like Mark Twain, they’re writing things of a satirical or sensitive nature, perhaps if a first grade teacher decides that he or she wants to publish erotic fiction, or if the writer has a government job and they’re not comfortable releasing a salacious novel, or a violent novel, or what have you under their own name. They may do it simply because they like their privacy. They simply just want to publish books. They don’t want to have to bother with marketing and interviews and all that stuff. They may also be doing it for their own protection, say if a female author has a restraining order against somebody or doesn’t want anyone to know who she is, she might publish under a pen name.

I’ve even heard of authors such as Joyce Carol Oates writing under pen names to free themselves from the expectation that is set with their name, that is connected to their name like, “Oh man, a new novel by so-and-so is coming out. It’s going to be amazing.” Maybe they just want to write something experimental. Maybe they’re not ready to write the next mind blowing book in the series. And that’s okay. There are a lot of different reasons that someone might choose to write under a pen name. Heck, maybe it just helps you to write. Maybe it gives you freedom to say things you wouldn’t be able to say if your name was actually attached to it. True story, I wrote under a pen name for years and years and years. I had a blog that I wrote under a pen name for years and years and writing under a pseudonym, under that pen name gave me a feeling of freedom that I could say things that were true and honest without having my name attached to them.

There’s something very liberating about writing somewhat anonymously, so if writing under a pen name will help you actually write and publish your novel, maybe that’s the way to go. However, before you make the decision as to whether or not you’re going to publish under a pen name, there’s a few questions that you should consider. First and foremost, will you want credit for your work later? Let’s face it, we’re writers and no matter how introverted or shy we are, we probably still have a little bit of ego. Writing is hard work and when you publish your work, are you okay knowing that if it becomes very successful, no one will know that you wrote it? Or if you go on to write more and more and more books, will you want to consolidate later? I have some books by JD Robb that are actually not by JD Robb. They are actually by Nora Roberts writing as JD Robb.

That consolidation, if that happens in the future could get kind of confusing/involved. Another question to consider is how secretive do you want to be? Do you want it to be like Cassandra Clare, who freely and openly admits that that’s not her real name? Or do you really truly and seriously need to make sure that nobody finds out that you wrote this book. Depending on how secretive you want to be, you may need to take certain measures like going to an attorney to help protect your real identity. You should also consider to what extent do you want your pen name to be a part of your life? And as you’re considering that, I urge you to think about your brand as a writer, as an author. So will this pen name be the URL of your website, your Twitter handle, will you want to be introduced under this pen name if you give a talk or do a book signing?

If you’re considering making this decision, think about all of these practical things. Also think about how it will feel to publish a book under a pen name. Does it make you feel freer or safer. If it does, this might be a very real option for you. Let’s talk real quick about how to pick a pen name, because this is one of those really fun things. It’s like trying on different outfits, except you’re trying on different personalities, kind of. So there are a ton of things you can consider when thinking about a potential pen name. You can pick something that has meaning to you, so maybe the name of a friend or relative, maybe a name with a certain meaning attached to it. Maybe you just want something that sounds great like Cassandra Clare, or sounds maybe fitting to the genre that you’re writing.

Do you ever notice that romance writers always have these wonderfully romantic names like Judith Ivory and Amanda Quick? I wonder sometimes if those are pen names and maybe their real life names are a little bit less perfect. Maybe you want to pick your name based on shelf placement. Maybe you want to publish under Aaron Aronson so that you can be the very first book on the shelf, or maybe want something that’s unique and memorable. Maybe you want something … Well, you definitely want something that’s unique, just so that people don’t confuse you for another writer with a potentially similar or the same name. But how memorable do you want it to be? It can be really fun to play around with different sound combinations and make sure you do say it out loud.

So we come though to the question of, should I use a pen name? And I think my answer is going to disappoint you because my answer is it is 100% up to you. The decision whether or not to use a pen name is extremely personal, so my job in this podcast episode was to give you a feel for the reasons you might want to consider using one or reasons you might not want to use one. Either way, I hope this was helpful. I hope it was interesting. And I hope that no matter what name you write under, that you feel like you have the freedom and the liberty to tell your story. So are you going to use a pen name? I would love to know. You can tell me and I won’t tell anyone else, but if you want, you can write me an email letting me know at hello@sarahwerner.com. That’s S-A-R-A-H-W-E-R-N-E-R.

You can also visit that website, navigate to the contact page, and fill out the handy little form there that will send it to my email as well. Or you can jump into the show notes for today’s episode, episode number 51 and leave me a comment. Again, I’m so interested and fascinated in different people’s pen names and why they choose to write under them and why they don’t. To be honest, I stopped using my pen name because it sounded a little childish to me. The name I had chosen was a little silly and so, I stopped using it and started writing under my own name. And I’m happy that I did that. That was just a choice that I made. So I’m interested in the choices that you’re making as you publish under a pseudonym or publish under your real name.

If you have additional questions about choosing a pen name, you can also get in touch with me. You can also start up a conversation on Twitter or Facebook. I’m kind of on all of the social medias, social medium, social media, I don’t know what plural is there. But I love getting in touch with listeners like you. And so, let me know what you’re thinking even if you’re having the kind of day that I’m having, where you don’t feel interesting at all. This podcast is brought to you by listeners like you. I love saying that. We didn’t watch a whole lot of TV growing up, but when we did, we could watch PBS. And all of the shows were brought to you by viewers like you. And so, I would like to thank my listeners who support me financially using a secure third party donation platform called Patreon. You can find that at patreon.com. That’s patreon.com/sarahwerner.

Alternately, you can search for the Write Now podcast on Patreon and find my page. If you want, you can make a donation, which is on a per episode basis. So if this is worth 50 cents per episode to you, a dollar per episode, $200 million per episode, et cetera, you can sign up to do that there. And it is greatly, greatly appreciated. Special thanks go out to Official Cool Cat, Rebecca Werner and Sean Locke, Official Bookworm, Matthew Paulson, Official Rad Dudes, Andrew Coons, and the Sioux Empire Podcast and Caffeine Enablers, Pulsating, and Colleen Cotalessa. You are all supremely wonderful, magical beings. Thank you so much for your generous support of the work I do here at the Write Now podcast. It means so much.

Again, if you would like to join the ranks of Patreon supporters, you can do so by clicking the link in today’s show notes that says help support this podcast. When you do that, you are helping bring this message to writers of all kinds, in all times, and in all places. Maybe not in all times, although who knows, maybe if I get enough Patreon funding, we can figure out time travel. This is bringing us to the end of today’s episode. And as we wrap things up, I want to remind you that you can write this, whatever it is you’re working on, your memoir, book of poetry, a novel, a nonfiction book, a term paper, whatever it is, you can do this.

And if it helps relieve some of the anxiety, or if it makes you feel braver or freer to write, use a pen name. Whatever name you publish you’re writing under, tell your story because the world needs to hear it. With that, this has been episode 51 of the Write Now podcast, the podcast that helps aspiring writers and all writers to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I’m Sarah Werner and yes, that is my real name.