I’ve thought before that if i were to be dropped back maybe 200 years ago i could maybe do okay for myself by passing off existing stories as mine. You’d have to change some details here and there, but you could absolutely write the terminator as a book and pretend it was your idea, for example. And people would never have read anything like it.

I don’t think you’d become rich and famous, because success is as much about time and place as it is ideas and talent. But I’m sure you’d be able to get them published and thus sell well enough to pay your bills on ideas alone.

Not true for something like Tolkien. Those need to be his words for the books to work. But Alien? Psycho? The thing? The day the Earth stood still? Forbidden planet? Arrival? You could sell those on ideas alone.