Fillers and Placeholders

When you’re hard at work on the first draft and running for daylight, you can’t afford to lose your forward momentum.  The first draft isn’t the time and place to spend fifteen minutes looking for the perfect name for that minor character who steps onto the page long enough to deliver a crucial bit of plot development before vanishing.

For the first draft, it’s often enough to have [CharacterName] appear from [NameOfPlace] with the necessary plot element in hand.  Just remember to search on the square brackets during the second-draft revisions, when you’re putting in that perfect name you finally came up with when you were drifting off to sleep the night before.