I’ve written elsewhere about why I have no desire to write under my real name.
Choosing a heteronym is easy enough, but it’s not impossible that one day I end up being asked for a headshot to accompany some work. And I obviously don’t want to share an actual picture of me for all of the same reasons that I feel the need to use a heteronym for my writing.
(Whether publishing should be quite so reliant on headshots as a form of publicising writers – especially new writers, and with all the obvious baggage around looks and marketability which that entails – is a topic for another day.)
So, in the ongoing spirit of using this space to document my progress (or otherwise) as a writer, here’s a 21st-century solution for heteronyms which wasn’t available to Fernando Pessoa back in the day: AI-generated portraits.
Shown below are five images produced by an AI Face Generator. They are, to a greater or lesser extent, disturbingly lifelike, but none of these men exist. And not one of them is me.
However, they were all generated from a recent picture of me1. So these pics are all broadly like me – my face could be found somewhere in the middle of them I guess – even if none of them really looks like me all that much. But, as explained previously, I’m not trying to obscure my identity for mischief or malice, or to pretend to be someone I’m not, I’m still a white British heterosexual male from a working class background. I just don’t want to write, in public, identifiably, as me.
Maybe I’ll adopt one of these visual identities in the future. Perhaps I’ll never need to. But either way, I’m being entirely transparent about this process and I’m also not co-opting someone else’s image just to avoid my own identity from being on show.
Rest assured, no middle-aged white men were harmed in the making of these entirely fake headshots.
A ARBOR, DECEMBER 2021
Not me 
Also not me 
Still not me 
Definitely not me 
This one is definitely me… NOT! 2
1) This is not the only option – you can start from a blank canvas and create a face which looks like almost anything or “anyone” you want, right down to the facial expression. There are lots of applications for doing so, and only some of them are sinister.
2) Note for our younger readers: for a few fleeting days/months/years in the 1990s, this particular sentence construction was the absolute wittiest thing it was possible for any human being to say out loud: