Leave a Marker and Keep Moving

A writer stops at a missing date and spends forty minutes finding it, and when she comes back, the thought that was driving the paragraph has gone. Or she invents a plausible number and keeps going, and three weeks later the number is in the text with no trace that it was invented. The second is worse, because a plausible invented fact looks exactly like a true one on the page.

Reporters have a third option. One drafting at speed writes that the mayor, who has served since TK, announced a plan costing TK. Newsrooms use TK as shorthand for “to come.” Poynter’s glossary of journalism terms defines it as a placeholder used in drafts to indicate that specific information is to come and will be added later. The letters were chosen, according to the usual account of the practice, because very few English words contain the sequence T-K, so a search for it finds the markers and little else.

A good marker names exactly what is missing, whether a date, a source, or a decision between two options. It uses a string that does not occur in the ordinary text, so a search can count how many remain, and it cannot be mistaken for prose and sent to a reader. TK, a bracketed note, or a doubled symbol would each do, as long as you know the convention and use it consistently. Uncertainty you can find does not have to be resolved immediately, and the writing goes back to its forward motion.

None of this excuses leaving the hard part blank forever. A manuscript made largely of “[scene goes here]” has only postponed its problems. Markers must be counted and resolved before the Work leaves your hands, and in work where facts matter, the closing pass is where verification happens.

Some writers cannot work this way, and they have reasons. A line that depends on the exact word can lose its rhythm to a bracket in the middle of the sentence. Zadie Smith describes finishing each floor of a novel before the next goes up (Practice 23), and a writer who builds in that order has little room for a marker, since whatever is missing is missing from a floor already declared finished. A poet may not be able to leave a hole in a line without losing the line. For writers like these, a short pause for the missing word is the better way to keep moving.

Practice. Find the problem that is stopping you now. It may be a missing fact, a name you have not chosen, a transition you cannot write, or a decision about the order of two scenes. Replace it with a marker in the text, using a string that appears nowhere else, and add a note that says what is needed and where you will look. Then write for twenty minutes beyond the marker without returning to it. At the end of the session, search for the string, count the markers, put the count somewhere you will see it, and choose the day on which you will close them. If the count falls from one session to the next, the markers are working as a device. If it keeps growing, they have become a way of postponing the problem.