maggie-stiefvater-deactivated20:

Dear bluestarawayworld,

I’ve gotten a lot of asks like this over the years. The timbre of the asks have changed (becoming less about how to survive public appearances and more about how to survive the internet, less about public speaking and more about people approaching your kids), and how I’d answer it has too. Probably how I answer it next year will look different to this.

But here’s my answer for now.

There are two parts to it. There is the real world, and there is internet.

Because I use my real name, people sometimes find my house, my kids, and where I shop. I keep my address as private as I can. I don’t take photos of the front of my house. But I don’t hide. Mostly it doesn’t matter, though — readers respect my privacy. “Please don’t come to my house,” I whisper to my readers, and they nod with understanding. Sometimes they send me soft messages through instagram: “I saw you in the store the other day and in my head I waved.” They gently keep their distance unless invited closer or at an event. Perhaps if I wrote different sorts of novels my readers would be different, but mostly my readers are lovely humans who respect boundaries. They wouldn’t want someone showing up at their house unannounced, and they assume I wouldn’t either. (thank you, guys, it’s appreciated).

As far as in-person hostility goes, it’s been confined to the signing line, when a very few people have been outrageously terrible to me. How terrible? Outrageously. And it was terrible, yes, capital O Outrageously and capital T Terrible, but it never felt dangerous.

I often tour on my own and I’m running my latest seminar series all on my own, and I don’t feel remotely in danger of being swept away by a Misery-style fan.

I do sometimes get recognized by the name on my credit card or my Barnes & Noble membership card, but I also get recognized by my face. That’s just being a human who’s toured and been at conferences and sometimes smiled for the internet.

So no, a pen name doesn’t feel like it really would have changed my in-person life.

However, the second part of this is about the internet. Because I use my real name on the internet, I can’t use the internet like most people. I’m not even that famous, but replying to a thread when you’ve got 120k followers is quite simply different than replying when you’ve got 300. 

Moreover — I’m 37 (I just looked it up on Wikipedia). I’ve been a published author for a decade, so, on the internet as an author since I was 27. Before that, I was on the internet as an artist under my real name for five or six years, so basically I’ve grown through most of my adult life to this point on the internet. And the internet, as they say, is forever.

I was not always the easiest or best person. 

Being me, Maggie Stiefvater, on the internet, means that there’s a fossil record of that.

And there are loads of other people all coming of age all over the internet, being brash and hostile and messy and uncertain and boundary-free, because no one is hatched as some perfect creature with great internet etiquette. Everyone cuts their teeth in public and sometimes that means they’re cutting their teeth on you. And when you’re a public figure, they — everyone else — is going to outnumber you. By a lot. And they will fling themselves at you now and again.

It will feel terrible.

They will write things about you that are true, which will be bad, but also write things that aren’t true, which is worse, and then they will screenshot any form of your sorrow to giggle at in threads for years to come, which is not nearly as bad but still weird, like feeling someone tap the same place on your arm for thirty minutes in a row.

But here’s the other thing: it’s survivable. It will not feel like it at first. You will read the first article about you on a shock blog that has nothing to do with reality and you might even sit on the floor of a shower of a bathroom on tour and wonder if it’s worth it, if any of it is worth it, but by the time you get to the tenth or the twelfth or the twentieth thinkpiece or four hundredth @ reply on a bad day, it will start to all feel the same, because it is the same, even if the words are different. 

I know I’m making it sound like you need a pen name to be safe. But that’s not what I’m trying to say.

Because the truth is that the discourse that feels hostile, sometimes threatening, sometimes dangerous, like it will spill into the real world, is generally not. Hostile would imply meaning — would imply that something matters, and generally the stuff that makes it to you as a public figure isn’t that. As a quasi-celebrity, you don’t actually matter to them. They sound hostile not because they care, but because they don’t. You’re not real, and so your reactions are trading cards. They’re a punchline. Something that felt real and bad to you three, four, five years ago, something that made you sit in a shower with your head in your hands while water soaked your clothes — it’s just their group’s inside joke. A hilarious “remember when?” screenshot fest.

And once you figure that out, it actually is all mostly okay. It’s weird, but it’s okay. You start to see what is actually going to affect your safety and privacy, and what’s just noise. You focus on stuff that’s real. You lean into the positive of the internet, of which there is much. You don’t, however, generally get to use the internet as your friends do. 

So asking me this question today, I would not tell you that you need a pen name to be safe or private, in my experience.

I would say that if you like using the internet in a relatively anonymous way, you need a pen name for either your work or your internet life.

I would also tell you that although this sounds insanely negative, the positives vastly outweigh it, but I far more rarely get asks that say “tell me what the best parts are of being a published author because I’m nervous.”

urs,

Stiefvater