Choosing the Biggest Fear Among Many

My fellow potatoes have described many fears that ring familiar with me, but perhaps none more than the fear that the “well has run dry” and I have used up all my good story ideas. The other fears – Are my characters believable and sympathetic? Is my plot contrived? Do I even have a plot? Am I just wasting my time? -- are manageable, to me, through the act of writing and revision. But the entire structure of a story rests on the original premise, the germ of an idea that must be unique enough to warrant the months of work it will take to develop it. That’s why, among certain writer friends of mine, when someone shares a great idea the rest of us congratulate him/her and then, inevitably, one of us utters the caveat: “If you don’t do something with it [the idea}, I will!” Though you cannot copyright ideas, and none of us would ever really “steal” someone else’s idea, it points out the value of such a rare and precious commodity. Luckily, I have enough “gems” to last me several years of writing (at the snail’s pace of my own production), but I am always on the lookout for new ideas to stash away for future use, hedging against the fear that someday the well will run dry….