Abandoned Idea Clearinghouse: By the World Forgot
Creative ideas are worth nothing. The value of a creative work arises from the hard work of developing the idea and the time to execute it. It lies in the disciplined hours you’ve already put in to hone your talent to the point where you can execute it well. It comes also from the energy you devote to making the connections to get the work in front of an audience and the personal wherewithal to maintain those collaborative relationships. When the work is complete and ready for an audience, you can further add to its impact by promoting it, to get it out there in the world
(A misconceived idea might be worth less than nothing, as the time, energy and resources you expend on it are wasted on something doomed to suck. The positive way of saying this is that another element of creating valuable work is to know which ideas to use and which to discard.)
If my idea file was a person, it would be ready to graduate high school by now. That passage of time has rendered some of the entries moot. For example:
Amnesia for sale
company sells memory wipes for people wanting to start over
That idea is valueless because I didn’t seize on it, brilliantly develop it as a screenplay, already have acclaimed similar scripts under my belt, and get it into the hands of a skilled director and top flight actors. While the entry was sitting untended in the file, Charlie Kaufman had the same simple idea and with Michel Gondry and cast did the heavy lifting to wind up with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.