I scratched the words across the yellow page of my legal pad in red: Too much magic. Underlined it. Then I looked at my manuscript, sat back, and realized I had a problem.

But, let’s come back to that in a minute. First I want to talk about how I got to that point.

Lately, I’ve been reading books on screenwriting. Not because I want to be a screenwriter (I don’t, at least not yet), but because those brave men and women who write for the small and big screens understand storytelling better than 99% of the world. They certainly understand it better than I do, so I’m learning a lot along the way.

Why do they understand it better? Well, it’s because they have to. Their job is to distill all of the elements of a good story–the dialogue, characters, narrative, plot, all of it–into a thick reduction sauce that goes down smooth. It’s got to taste slow cooked, but has to be done in microwave time. They don’t have 400 pages to tell their story. They have 110 if they’re writing for movies. Less if they’re writing for TV. That means they must force the story down to its essence, which is ultimately what the audience cares about and will invest themselves in. If they do it right.

This requires playing by the rules of storytelling. Yes, there are rules. Whether or not a writer is successful depends largely on their ability to master the rules governing their chosen genre’s universe. Like gravity, you can’t fight story physics for long before you realize who’s stronger. It’s pretty obvious. Thrillers have one set of rules while romances have another. True, there are some conventions that can be bent or broken from time to time, but natural laws of storytelling always win. Always. We’ve all read or watched stories that fell flat. They broke the rules.

Which brings me to a key lesson I learned this week about trying to cram too much magic into a story. As writers, especially those working on that debut book or screenplay, we want to take all of the  best ideas we’ve ever had, or been moved by, and meld them into a single magical story. Problem is it’s too much magic. And too much magic usually leads to a story that’s a pointless mishmash.

Let me show you what I mean. Have you heard this before: “My story is The Matrix meets Pirates of the Caribbean meets Lord of the Rings.” Really? That’s a lot to stuff between two covers. “But I can pull it off,” you say. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Stories that are about everything risk being about nothing.

Blake Snyder, a movie screenwriter that I stole the “too much magic” idea from, cautions that an audience can only handle one piece of magic in any given story. Two is too many. Three is disastrous. If aliens land on earth that’s one thing. OK, I can handle that. But if they’re bitten by vampires and then become vampire aliens, well, that’s too much magic even it is the best thing since Twilight. You have to choose your use of magic wisely. Too much and you’ll lose the audience. They won’t buy it. Too little and they won’t buy it either.

What does that mean? Well, for me that meant going back and stripping out some elements of my story that, while very cool, muddled the story. Sometimes less really is more. As I got in there and limited my magic to one thing, cutting all along the way, the story got better, more focused. Sure I’ve got to re-write, it’ll be a better story for it. By the end of the weekend I had a much clearer sense of what happens next and it felt right.

You’ve got to be willing to get in there and brutally assess your story, though. Do you have too much going on in there? Too many competing elements? Go back and look at the plot threads of your story and ask if you’re trying to cram too much magic in there. There’s a good chance that you might be and not even know it.