I can't remember if I've written about this before or not, but I was thinking about how I can really see the appeal sometimes of having a pen name as a writer.  It just creates a level of insulation between yourself and the world, and also separation between yourself and the writer persona.  If by some crazy happenstance you got super famous having the ability to say it's the pen name that's famous, not me could be nice and also help you maintain a sense of grounding.  Similarly if you wrote something that ended up being controversial, it's the pen name people could get mad at and you could hopefully live some semblance of a normal life.  If things ever got really bad, you could ditch the pen name altogether and start fresh under a different name.  

I sort of inadvertently created a pen name when I joined Wattpad and chose my username.  I'm sure there are a lot of my readers who know me first and foremost as Wuckster.  I've put my real name on a lot of my covers, but I'm tempted to lean hard into the pen name and say everything was written by Charles Wuckster or something like that.  I don't know, I'm mulling it over in my mind.  I might just do it one of these days.