Advice for crafting wishes: When you wish for a suitcase full of money, you must specify that you don't mean a gentlemen's toiletry case that your then-teenage older brother put pretty looking pocket change into in 1978.

Here follows some further advice on how to make a wish, which I have learned the same way I learned the above: by experience. This is general wish advice, so it doesn't matter whether you are making your wishes via folk magic, such as birthday candles or a wishing well or a dandelion or a star, or a formal spell of some kind, or by appealing to a wish granting entity.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Manifesting Wholehearted Wishes, the first thing a wish must be is wholehearted. That is, what some traditions would call your True Will. If you hedge a lot or put a lot of conditions on it, the energy disperses.

Here's an example of a wish with a lot of hedging built in and then a wholehearted version:

Version A: "I wish my cat would stop biting me, unless that means I couldn't have him with me, or if he died or got lost or something."

Version B: "I wish to teach my cat not to bite me."

Version B has it built in that nothing bad is going to happen to the cat because this is about teaching and learning, but you don't end up spelling out the things that you don't want.