Reminds me of a story I heard about Tom Waits (and now you've read it). What idea did you have that was milk-thirsty in a different format?
I absolutely loved that Waits' article! That is perfectly fitting to the conversation. Here are two ideas from my text file:
Robot Dragon story, something about a boy who builds a robot dragon who ultimately destroys an entire town Asteroid story, an life long astronomer discovers an asteroid and gets it named after herself, only to find that it's heading straight toward earth and will kill her grandchildren. She has an existential crisis. I also get a lot of software ideas.
This is what separates writers from others - the ability and desire to put the fucking pen to the fucking paper. I have a couple friends that hassle me during NaNoWriMo. One of them wrote me an email recently saying "I've got all the big set pieces but all the stuff in between is boring and I don't like writing it. How can I change this?" I told him "that boring stuff between the crap you want to write? THAT'S THE JOB. The art of writing is the art of taking the shit that isn't interesting and making it interesting not just for you, but for everyone who reads you." That is what keeps people from "writing the stories."