Your main character whispered her name to you in a dream. You feel the name of your romantic lead like it came through a direct channel from your muse. You’re just about to write the scene when they go to her workplace when you realize you don’t have a name for her boss and so you spend 45 minutes on a baby name site trying to find the perfect meaningful name for this character that only appears once in the entire book.

This can happen lots of different ways. No matter how many names you’ve picked out ahead of time, you’ll always run into a secondary character, location or concept that you don’t have a name picked out for yet. If you write sci fi, paranormal or fantasy, this can be especially bad because you’re always looking for unusual names for abilities, types of magic, new species, made up technology and other unusual scenarios. It’ll stop you in your tracks and you’ll feel this urgent need to pour over baby name books and foreign language dictionaries for a name with just the right amount of symbolism and meaning.

All that time you’re spending obsessing over the names of things? It’s a waste of time. While you’re writing your first draft, don’t bother with naming characters, places or anything for that matter.

If you have a character name in mind, by all means use it but if it takes more than a few seconds to come up with one, move on. It’ll speed up your writing and help you to get the story finished. Besides, most of the time, the names will come to you in time as you write the rest of the story.

My first drafts read like this: “Well,” said GUARD1 to SLAVE3, “Do you think the SPECIAL ARMY NAME will make it through EVIL SCARY PLACE?” Find and replace will be your friend later when you come up with the names for things but, for now, just give them a placeholder name and move on with the story.

Story is king. The names aren’t as important as they feel.