>>95627095 (OP)Here is a trick that has served me well more than once: take a show, or a book, or a game that you you find interesting and want to read/watch/play, but have not done so yet. You've seen pictures of it, or heard about bits and pieces, but you still don't know most of the plot but you are interested on what you do know about it.
Then, before you actually consume that media, imagine what you *think* that story is going to be based on what little you know, and built out the plot from there. You typically end up with something wildly different from the product itself, but in the same rough genre and based on the parts of the thing that got you interested in it in the first place.
You won't use that imagined version of the story in its entirety, but its likely that you will have a couple of cool ideas that came from that which are, effectively, shit you came up with yourself and no one would recognize as being taken from the work you were imagining based off of.
As an example, after I heard about Steins;Gate but before I watched it, I imagined that a key plot point was that the messages sent to the past would cause problems by nature of being sent from different versions of the future, but the past has no idea that all of these messages were sent by effectively unrelated future timelines. The first message sent back is accurate. Maybe the second. But as the show iterates through timelines warnings are sent back in time and increasingly poisoning the well of the time-travel messages until it becomes effectively unusable because there are too many messages to read through and most of them are basically bullshit that can't even happen in the same timeline as any of the other shit.
I later used this idea as a plot detail in a supernatural conspiracy game, where the spooky MIB agency had a machine that worked like this and an entire department of people dedicated to trying to figure out future events with it with a low success rate.
