PEN NAME, PSEUDONYM, NOM DE PLUME…

Most writers toy with the idea of taking a pen name at one time or another. Whether it’s because your name is unpronounceable (Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski aka Joseph Conrad) or because of bias against your gender in the genre in which you write (Alice Bradley Sheldon, who wrote SF as James Tiptree, Jr.), there are as many different reasons for writing under a pen name as there are, well, pen names.

 

Maybe your last book didn’t do so well, for instance. You might want to ditch the sales history by starting fresh under a new name. Some writers prefer to write their naughty stories under a pen name. Dean Wesley Smith wrote an article on pen names that gives a brief history of pen names and expands on the many reasons a writer might choose to use one.

 

So far, I have only one pen name: Emma Faraday. And it’s clearly not a secret. I decided to create a pen name to keep the different genres in which I write separate. Under Emma Faraday, I publish science fiction and fantasy. Under Marcelle Dubé, I publish mostly mystery. Using different names gives the reader a clue to the kind of story he or she can expect. That way, a reader looking for some of my fantasies won’t pick up one of my mysteries by mistake and be disappointed.

 

Writers, do you use pen names (that you’re willing to divulge)? Readers, are you aware of all the pen names of your favourite writers?

 

Below, I’ve compiled a quick list of pen names and the real names of the writers. Feel free to add to it! 

 

Pen Name                  Real Name

Acton Bell                           Anne Brontë

Currer Bell                          Charlotte Brontë

Ellis Bell                              Emily Brontë

Boz                                      Charles Dickens

Lewis Carroll                      Charles Lutwidge Dodgson

Richard Castle                   Richard Alexander Rodgers

George Eliot                      Mary Ann Evans

O. Henry                             William Sydney Porter

Hergé                                  Georges Remi (Belgian writer/artist of the Tintin series)

George Orwell                   Eric Arthur Blair

Lewis Padgett                    Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore (husband and wife team of SF writers)

J.D. Robbs/Jill March       Nora Roberts

Lemony Snicket                 Daniel Handler

Barbara Vine                      Ruth Rendell

 

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How fast is too fast?

I don’t write fast. Being a pantser rather than a plotter means that I often write myself into corners and must then delete, delete, delete until I find where I went wrong and start over again.

Take my latest novel, Backli’s Ford. It started as a novella way back in August 2009. After I finished writing it, I realized that the darned thing was really meant to be a novel. Not only that, but it would be the first in a series. So I started over. By my calculations, that’s over two and a half years for one novel. That’s long, even for me.

In my defense, during that two and a half years, I sold two novels to Carina Press, wrote a sequel to The Shoeless Kid (The Tuexedoed Man), a short story in the Mendenhall Mysteries world, Night Shift (still available for free but not for much longer) and self-published a number of short stories and novels (under my own name and a pen name, Emma Faraday).

Now, I know people who can write 10,000 words a day and not die. That’s not me. I’ll never produce five or six novels a year, and that’s fine. However, I’ve learned that I can produce stories a lot faster than I ever thought I could. How?

Persistence. In other words, applying seat of pants to seat of chair, day in and day out.

This is the way I look at it. I have a full-time job, so my writing time is in the evening and during the weekend. So, say I write 500 words a day, every day. That’s 500 words x 7 days = 3500 words a week. At that rate, I could have a first draft of a 70,000-word novel in 20 weeks, or five months.

And 500 words a day, well that’s nothing really, but let’s leave it at that for weekdays, and double it during the weekend. So that’s 4500 words a week, or one 70,000-word novel in under four months.

That’s three novels a year, with some down time built in, just by being persistent.

It seems simplistic, but it does work. For me, at least. At least partly. I may not produce three novels a year, but I do get a lot of words down (again, for me) in the form of short story, novella and novel.

Now I have a question — do you think less of a writer who produces work quickly? I’ve heard some people say that you can’t possibly produce quality work if you write quickly. Is that generally accepted, or is it bunk?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Marcelle

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