Hot Dogs
Most ideas aren’t that good. They’re not precious flowers sprung from divine inspiration, and unless you’re extremely lucky—or perhaps extremely unlucky—your life is probably not a rich, thrilling tale for the ages, an endless fount of inspiration from which to draw your stories.
If you’re anything like me, or the vast majority of other creators I know, your ideas are more like hot dogs. They’re made by taking a bunch of meaty bits from other things that you love and mashing them all up into a sort of paste which is squeezed through a tube to form what looks like an autonomous idea. A hot dog. How you dress that hot dog up, how you cook it and prepare it, that comes with practice—and undoubtedly some hot dogs are better than others, but let’s not kid ourselves—at the end of the day, most of us, save for the rare, once-in-a-generation geniuses, are making hot dogs.