"When everyone in the community reads the same books, you can an inward-looking, intellectually impoverished community that can only contemplate its own navel."
Most projects don't end up anywhere near where they start out, and for good reasons.
The idea that you have to guard your story ideas, lest someone steal them, is a pernicious myth.
How everything from 'The Battle Of Algiers' to 'Soul Eater' fed into the making of my new novel.