: Re: Can I use my legal name as the protagonist if I'm pitching my book to traditional publishers under a pen name? Can I use my legal name as the protagonist if I'm pitching my book to traditional

@Ann1701686

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Besides the real world repercussions Arcanist Lupus has mentioned, there are story-internal considerations to be made.

In fiction, names carry meaning and therefore certain names fit certain characters better than others. For example, in the Lord of the Rings, if the hobbit had been called Gandalf and the wizard's name had been Frodo, the names wouldn't have emphasized their personalities and role in the story in the way they do, and calling the elf John Smith would have been totally unfitting.

But even in stories set in the real world, readers imagine a different person when she's called Rose than when her name is Freedom or Alaska. Names of fictional characters have to fit the genre, and because certain sounds and names evoke certain personalities they are part of the description of the character. For that reason, publishers often require that the names of characters are changed.

So when you name your characters, you should consider which names best fit the type of person you are writing. Your own name might fit, or it might not.

Finally, when you feel that your character should carry your name, you may be making a mistake common to beginning writers: you do not write fiction, but a daydream.

Instead of coming up with a story interesting to readers and developing characters for that story, you may be dreaming yourself into a situation you find titillating (such as an erotic or power fantasy) which may not have much appeal beyond self-gratification.

So make sure you understand what you're doing. We all write stories that we enjoy, but to write good characters there has to be some processing and abstraction that usually doesn't happen when you put yourself in your story, resulting in characters that are both too complex to be interesting and too unidimensional and "obsessed" to be likeable.

Real peole don't make good fictional characters. Good fictional characters are always a bit stereotypical and exemplary.

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