User blog comment:Anarchic Operations/Sources of Inspiration/@comment-4715955-20160612074616

"I'm not as good as this other writer."

Use it as inspiration to get better. Or don't write.

"My idea isn't original enough."

Spoilers! Nobody's idea is original. Hasn't been since the days of the ancient Greeks. It's HOW you tell the story, not WHAT story you tell.

What you've described are lazy excuses to avoid putting in the work required to learn the craft. You HAVE to read other people's work, good and bad, if you want to be a writer, just like you HAVE to learn about cars that were previously built before you can become an auto mechanic. There's no way around it. You don't have to always be constantly reading all the time -- at that point you probably do face the risk of just recycling everything you see -- but in the beginning, you have to read a lot, and you have to copy a lot for practice. Later, when you can write an engaging story with a plot and characters that make sense, and do it that well just about every time, THEN you can get away with not reading very much and focusing on the concepts themselves.

Even authors considered the most innovative and original had their influences in other authors. Lovecraft was inspired by Chambers and Poe. Every single thing he wrote was the result of him reading or seeing something he liked and wanting to do something similar, but as he did he went, "let's just do this aspect a little differently". The result was distinct enough that the word "Lovecraftian" is in the dictionary. John Gardner wrote 14 James Bond novels after Ian Fleming died, and they were all formulaic as hell, but I'll be damned if you can put one down long enough for a bathroom break. He didn't learn how to write page-turners by not reading.

Dreams have been the source of inspiration for most writers at one point or another. Hell, the climax of my Daddy's Girl webcomic came from a dream. However, you worry so much about originality that you haven't taken enough time to develop your voice, and I think that might be the reason you haven't yet posted a story here that sucks me in or makes me care about what's going on. Maybe your concepts are original as hell (encouraging aspiring authors to build a creepypasta around an OC is a big fat red flag in this regard), but I won't care how original it is if it doesn't suck me in. You learn to do that by example, not by sitting in a coffee shop and turning up your nose at established writing theory.