How can you keep your writing separate from your personal social circle? Many creators don’t want close friends and family to see their work, because writing is private—like having your diary read by relatives. Utsudo runs a real-name account and a separate pen-name account, adding only editors, writer friends and readers to the latter. Algorithms may still lead family to you, though, so how strictly you separate the two ultimately depends on what you’re comfortable with.

Translated from Utsudo’s original Chinese column.

I wonder if any of you have struggled with the issue in the title.

Recently I was chatting with a friend who also writes, and we discussed this question: “What should you do if you want to keep your writing separate from your everyday social circle?”

Why keep writing separate from your personal life?

First, let’s understand why people want to separate “writing” from their “social circle.”

Generally, it’s about an emotional hurdle: you feel it would be awkward if close friends and family saw what you wrote.

Writing starts from yourself and is very private—sometimes it’s practically a diary. Imagine the embarrassment of your family reading your diary. Just picturing it is uncomfortable.

And if a complaint about someone gets seen, it’s even more awkward—you can’t deny it (X

That’s a bit extreme, of course. Many people write online—essays, for example—and the content isn’t limited to daily life; it also covers work, or recent reflections on life. But those are still fairly personal, and it’s uncomfortable when people you know see them.

Strangely, sharing your inner thoughts with strangers doesn’t feel nearly as bad. Maybe it’s a kind of psychological self-protection?

A real-name account and a pen-name account

Back to the topic: if you want to separate the two, what do people usually do?

Taking myself as an example, on Facebook I have a real account and an alternate account. The real account uses my real name, and at least 90% of the friends list are people I know in real life—family, classmates, coworkers and so on.

On that account I hardly post anything about my online activities. Honestly, I’m pretty low-key and don’t post much anyway, and later I got too lazy to keep logging in and out, so I barely use it.

My alternate account is under my pen name, and almost all the friends there are people I met later—editors, writer friends, fans and so on. My fan page falls into this category too.

Fan pages, algorithms and the risk of being found out

As for fan pages, their reach has been cut so low that many people don’t bother running one and use a personal profile instead. Personal profiles have better reach and no cap on followers—but you can’t run ads on them, so it depends on your needs.

But honestly, thanks to the damn algorithm, once you’ve grown to a certain point you’ll notice something odd: a relative sends you a friend request, the “people you may know” sidebar shows real-life friends, and worse still, your ex-boyfriend’s account shows up????

I have no idea how this all-powerful algorithm works. In short, if you write online, you always risk being caught by real-life friends—unless you deny it to the death XD

Or you separate them completely so no one could guess they’re the same person. But I’m not writing anything shameful, so I don’t think it needs to be that meticulous, as if I were planning a crime. Too much hassle.

Your tolerance for embarrassment will gradually grow

Maybe over time your tolerance for embarrassment will rise until you don’t care at all whether relatives and friends read your writing, and the worry just vanishes.

Right now my tolerance is about medium. If possible, I’d still prefer that family and friends not read it, but that doesn’t seem to be something I can prevent (covers face). Maybe I just need more time to adjust.

Once I’ve adjusted, maybe I’ll release Ghost Island more widely elsewhere, or even serialize it directly on my fan page.

But this is just my personal view. How far you separate the two is up to you.

So, would you separate them completely, or just share openly with people around you?

FAQ

Further reading

• Previous: Hey! I Heard You’re a Writer on Ghost Island #122: Learn This Trick for Dealing with Freeloaders!
• Start from the beginning: Hey! I Heard You’re a Writer on Ghost Island #01: Utsudo’s Debut — A Road to the Dream Covered in Frost
• Utsudo’s books

About the author

Utsudo is a Taiwanese light novelist and novelist VTuber with more than ten years in the industry and 40 commercially published print books. Her novel 《遺失的情書》 received a 2022 Ministry of Culture youth creative award. The 《嘿！聽說妳在鬼島當作家》 series records her experiences as a novelist in Taiwan.