Placeholders

I was working on The Crowns of the Martyrs, writing the scene in which Ligonier Cardinal Rafferty visits the Archbishop of Vaildai to congratulate him on being named to the sacred purple, and I knew Urdan was having some kind of emergency that kept him from being present at Ligo's arrival, as protocol would really require. However, I soon realized that I was writing around the nature of the problem, and the text was effectively a placeholder.

Placeholders can be tricky. Sometimes they can enable you to write around some minor bit of information, like the name of a minor character who'll only appear once, or some minor incident that isn't really critical to the story, so that you can keep the story energy flowing. Then, when you've got the whole novel written, you can look back and see what fits best into that odd little spot, and it's actually likely to have more resonance with the whole story than if you'd stopped and tried to force the right answer as you went.

But if it's actually a placeholder for something critical to the story, it can sap the story of life, or even keep you from reaching the conclusion the way it really needs to be done. And if you don't realize that you've got a placeholder for the real thing, you can end up with a limp, lifeless story.