Kid in a Candy Store

When a writer lands on a story idea, it usually happens one of two ways. It's either like being hit by lightening or like watching a seed germinate. Either way, once the story takes root, your head starts to swim in The Sea of Possibilities...

This is good--possibilities always are, but if you're not careful, you start to look like this:

or like this:

and then, eventually like this:

Having a fiction writer's imagination can be both a blessing and a curse. We spin straw into gold but sometimes, we get carried away. Every idea we have is a good one, every plot twist we come up with is absolutely paramount to the outcome of the story (or so we fool ourselves into believing), so we pile it on. We're gluttonous. Greedy. We have what I call Kid-in-a-candy-store-itis.

Before we know it we're working plot points for a paranormal, dystopian, sci-fi western about a half-vampire, half-werewolf who falls in love with a time-traveling mermaid... which, by the way, has absolutely nothing to do with our initial story idea.

Just remember to keep it simple. With roughly 1,100 years between us and the first printed page, an original plot is damn near impossible. Originality comes from our voice. Don't let it become cluttered and bogged down by an over active imagination or you'll end up like this guy:

  And remember: friends don't let friends write paranormal, dystopian, sci-fi,westerns about a half-vampire, half-werewolf who falls in love with a time-traveling mermaid.