Great Story Ideas™
• Great ideas for stories are useless unless you can add compelling characters and great writing.
• Crappy ideas can make great stories if they have great characters and/or great writing.
• People who have a “great idea” for a story are the bane of writers. They always want to tell you all about it: “You’re a writer? Well, have I got a great idea for you!” The frequent offering of “great ideas” by complete strangers is one of the reasons I rarely tell anyone I write fiction
• I don’t know why particular stories are compelling to me, but if your ideas aren’t, it doesn’t matter how great they are. If you think you have a great idea, go write the story yourself. But stop bothering me, because I’m just not interested. I don’t lack ideas, I lack ideas I care about enough to spend an enormous amount of effort writing down. And you are unlikely to come up with an idea that I find compelling, because the ideas I find compelling are often so unlikely to make good stories that you would never come up with them or think they were “great.”
• “Great Story Ideas” that strangers want to regale you about are also almost always about the “furniture” of a story (see “It’s Not About the Furniture,” below).

#2: You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be v. different.

http://io9.com/5916970/the-22-rules-of-storytelling-according-to-pixar

I do think (as in the personage of what I just finished reading), a writer can be so love in with cool ideas that the rest of the work suffers, sometimes badly.