Persona vs. Pen Name, and WITD

by

In Today’s Journal

* A New Short Story
* Bradbury Reminder
* Writing Under a Persona or Pen Name
* Great Comment and Question
* The Numbers

A New Short Story

“One Hot Late Afternoon in June” went live yesterday at 10 a.m. on my Stanbrough Writes Substack. Go check it out. It’s free.

If you enjoy the story, please click Like. Comments are welcome too. Both help with my Substack algorithms. Then tell Everyone else.

Bradbury Reminder

Today is Saturday. Just a reminder to get your Bradbury Challenge story info in to me before the Journal goes live on Monday.

Remember, if you finish a story earlier in the week, you can send the info to me early too. It never hurts to avoid pushing the deadline.

Writing Under a Persona or Pen Name

A writer in Norway and I were talking a little about pseudonyms yesterday in the comments.

The best reason today to use a pen name is if you write something that you’d rather not have associated with your real name.

For example, if you’re a pastor and you write erotic fiction, you might wanna use a pen name. Same thing (maybe) if you’re a cop and you write grisly crime fiction from the perspective of the criminal.

She mentioned she’d considered using a pen name because her last name “might be hard for non-Finnish people” but she decided against it.

Then I mentioned I wish I’d used a “permanent” pen name for most of my work when I started out. My name’s so long it doesn’t fit nicely on book covers. But that ship’s pretty much sailed.

I used several personas for a while as well as a few pen names. Click this link to read about the difference between personas and pen names.

If I had it to do over, I probably would have written most of my stuff under Nick Porter (full name Nicolas Z Porter). He’s the persona who’s most like me.

I also wrote as

  • Eric Stringer for the stranger stuff,
  • Gervasio Arrancado for the magic realism (he and I have even co-written a book before),
  • MJ François (female) for erotica, and
  • Ray Sevareid, though I didn’t write as him very much. He’s too much like Stringer, and writing as Stringer was a little unnerving to say the least.

When I decided I wasn’t going to use personas anymore, I even wrote a short story in which Eric Stringer (the rest of us believe) killed Nick Porter. The story was set around Porter’s funeral. Great fun.

Each of my personas even has his (or her) own brief bio, and back in the day a couple of them had interviews on Smashwords.

If you’d like to read their bios, take a look at the Our Authors page at StoneThread Publishing. Writing the bios was a great deal of fun, especially for Nick, Gervasio, and Eric.

On that page, only Kenneth Flowers was a real human being and was not me. He was a dear high school friend who wrote an excellent book about living with COPD. In his memory, we offer that one free of charge to anyone who needs or wants it.

Great Comment and Question

KC Riggs left this comment:

Harvey, you’ve trained us to be suspicious of writing advice from people we don’t know. What if they’re teaching the myths?

Here’s my response:

Great points, my friend. Thanks. And you’re right, most writing craft authors (but not all) promote the myths. Two things:

1. I vetted the authors before I bought the books (re what they’ve written, how much they’ve written, etc.).

2. I’ve spent almost every day of 11 years teaching WITD and illustrating the effects with my own numbers. I figure by now some can glean good information on craft while ignoring the myths.

Writers are facing an uphill battle for sure.

The myths of writing permeate society. They long ago became the accepted way to write.

I see them often in films and TV series, and they come at us from all sides in ads, writers’ groups and critique groups, etc.

But those of us who’ve learned the value of letting go of process and focusing on the characters and the story that they, not we, are living find it easy to ignore them.

Of the millions of fiction writers out there, only two quiet voices talk regularly about the freeing, non-process of writing into the dark: Dean Wesley Smith and me.

A few bits of advice for my newer subscribers:

1. When you think about buying any nonfiction book on writing, first take a few minutes to vet the author. How much has s/he written and published? If the answer is not much, don’t buy the book.

2. Trust yourself and your characters (your creative subconscious) and just write the story. You don’t have to outline, revise, seek critical input, rewrite ad nauseam, etc. All of that will only slow you down and eventually stop you from writing.

3. Key “writing into the dark” into the search block in the sidebar at the Journal website.

I also recommend you buy DWS’ book Writing Into the Dark.

Many have also found of value my own nonfiction books, especially

Both books are available everywhere, but those links go to my online discount store.

Happy writing.

The Numbers

The Journal…………………………… 880

Writing of Blackwell Ops 47: Sam Granger | Special Duty

Day 1…… 3250 words. To date…… 3250
Day 2…… 1110 words. To date…… 4360

Fiction for August..………………….. 1110
Fiction for 2025………………………. 527757
Nonfiction for August………………… 10460
Nonfiction for 2025…………………… 178860
2025 consumable words…………….. 699003

2025 Novels to Date…………………….. 13
2025 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2025 Short Stories to Date……………… 31
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………….. 117
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 301
Short story collections……………………. 29

Whatever you believe, unreasoning fear and the myths that outlining, revising, and rewriting will make your work better are lies. They will always slow your progress as a writer or stop you cold. I will never teach the myths on this blog.

Writing fiction should never be something that stresses you out. It should be fun. On this blog I teach Writing Into the Dark and adherence to Heinlein’s Rules. Because of WITD and because I endeavor to follow those Rules I am a prolific professional fiction writer. You can be too.

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Questions on writing and publishing are always welcome at harveystanbrough@gmail.com.