Recipe for Conjuring Up a Story

For an upcoming story about the nature of dreams, I'm writing about an adjunct professor at a strange college in the South. The recipe is as follows, always remembering that without love, inspiration, and discipline nothing in this world is more than merely edible:1 character from my imagination and memories from university, conjured up from the thought of someone leaving the Natural History Museum in disgrace1 torn-out Harper's article on subsistence food made from glue and boots (Stalingrad defenders)1 torn-out Harper's article on the calcified ashes of prisoners (recently discovered)1 book on the Natural History Museum, cataloguing all of its eccentricities3 photocopied pages of various techniques or maneuvers carried out by John Le Carre (in particular, one page demonstrating how to create subtle differences between two characters, one page showing how to manage progressions in a scene, and one page with an interesting way of showing deafness).Add a dash or two of:Let boil for three or four weeks, and it'll come out of the oven hot, compact, and delicious (although you might have to have an acquired taste for ink and papyrus). Serves anywhere from one to a couple hundred thousand, depending on your good or bad fortune.