I'll chip in with something that might help. The ideas for stories you talk about are your "initial ideas" - much like panning for gold - finding a raw nugget isn't enough in itself - who do you know that treasures a cancerous lump of gold? The ideas you need are the ones that will help fashion this initial idea, this raw material, into something fascinating, beautiful and beguiling that someone will want to take to heart: initial ideas on their own are never enough. Now, of you are a rock climber looking up at where you want to get to (or even where you think you want to get to to begin with) - you can look up at the rock face and see sections that, even though difficult, look climbable. You have to discovery or invent ways to overcome the difficult sections to knit a route together - I think this is the skill a writer needs to think about developing. Firstly, like a climber, I genuinely believe there is a solution - I always believe there is a way. I've written lots of songs - many of them start off promisingly and then I got a problem or run out of ideas or I don't really know, never knew in fact, where the song was going anyway - what it's point was BUT I have seen breakthroughs come - usually after much time turning ideas over on my head, or after researching something, or by making a connection to something else I've been absorbed with - there are many ways this can happen - and these breakthroughs seen to come out of nothing and in an instant but in reality I don't think that is how inspiration works - but I've seen how a new idea can unlock a problem and show you to move forward. I definitely think I have to stand back from the problem and think more laterally, more widely, more loosely about what I'm working on and not be so wedded to my initial ideas or where I thought they were going. Paul Simon, in Paul Zollo's huge excellent book of interviews with songwriters, said during his writing for the Graceland album, he noticed his songwriting changed - he likened his initial ideas to finding the end of a piece of string - out of curiosity, he tries to follow it to see where it leads - so he's saying he accepts that he doesn't always have a clear idea of where he is going or why, at the beginning - he likens it to an act of discovery. If what I'm writing isn't interesting I take several steps back to look at way to make it interesting - this part of my job as a writer - to work at making it, keeping it interesting, staying ahead of expectations, out-thinking the reader - I step back many times and reject ideas because they are too obvious, too easy, a cliche perhaps - seriously, I believe that sometimes quite subtle twists, shall ideas, can turn a mundane storyline into something interesting - I've seen it happen many times. I was helping a friend with a song about the strange, lonely existence living in the unpeopled wide rural expanses, in the backwoods of Oregon - I put one line into his song that completely changed an atmospheric song into something much darker and sinister - the line was "pretty little in the back of my car" - it's a connection made, I think, with my impression of the strange stories I hear coming from America, about the murders, feuds and abductions in very isolated areas where normal rules of law or morals sometimes break down. It also taps into dark, deep rooted fears - I see this as groundwater which we all share - it connects us - so going deeper emotionally is one way to look for new angles to connect your story with the reader - look at what we all share.
I enjoy crosswords and buy the Times Jumbo books of 60 crosswords - I don't like them because they are easy, I like it because they need some thinking about, where would the interests be if they were easy - I enjoy writing exactly because it is difficult, there is a while series of little and big problems that need solving - you've got to learn to love the whole process - not just the part where you get an initial idea. If you don't enjoy it, all of it, why do it?