I read an enormous amount of manhua and manga, and one thing that I noticed a while ago they do is put an “X” for anything that they’re being vague about and don’t necessarily need the details of. Company names, university names, dates etc. It was something that I hated at first, because I felt that writers should know and provide those details, but the longer I read, the more I realised those details were insignificant enough that it was easier to look at the “X” than to be given unnecessary information. Of course, if they did it for all minor details, then maybe I would hate it.

I’ve seen a lot people talk about how hard it is for them to come up with names, and that’s one of the easiest parts of writing for me. BUT, like everyone else, if I do get stuck on a name, it’s hard to move forward. Which is a bad thing, because I know what I’m meant to be writing next, but I just can’t bring myself to because this current sentence hasn’t been completed. To get around this, I have borrowed from one of my favourite reading mediums: the “X”.

If you spend more than a minute on it, mark it X and then keep going.

If there’s a character or a land or empire that I can’t quite think of the right name for, I now mark it “X” and just keep going with what I’m writing. I go back to it later, and it’s often in the middle of writing everything else that something strikes me as fitting. And then I just Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V a bunch of times. It’s a great way of letting me not break that flow because I’m stuck there chewing on a name and not quite get the right one.