Stir the Plot

Storytellers get much of their ideas and inspiration from other stories. If handled in a non-sinister manner, those stories are not immediately copied, in whole or in part, but instead sent down into the mind’s basement kitchen, to stew and simmer, along with all of the other stuff already down there, filtering out the good from the bad, the better from the good, adding in a dose of “yes, but I would have done it differently,” until something new and original, and absolutely not a rip off, rises out of the cauldron, ready to become one’s own stories. It’s this same process that makes it so easy to forget where all the individual bits came from.

Source: Bill Willingham on Fables vs Once Upon A Time