My paper is unlike any other paper, how can I write about related work?

I've heard this argument many too many times, so I wanted to address it broadly.  The essential argument is:

I found this obscure lucky wonderful impactful topic to investigate, and now that I'm done and written my 12+ page conference paper on it, I can't write about any related work.  First, I can't find any other paper on this topic, and second the idea came to me in a flash of brilliance and so it's not like I thought of it because of some other published papers.

First, this comes across as some kind of "10x engineer" BS, and you're going to want to nip that in the bud.  You didn't live in a bubble while becoming the person that could write this paper. 

Second, if you're going to get your paper accepted, and more importantly, make a difference in your research community, you're going to want to do a good job of writing about related work.  People's  minds don't hold ideas in islands, isolated from everything else they know.  (Actual islands aren't even islands...)  You want people to place your topic in context and connect it to other things they know, so that they will remember your research and results.  Like, when talking with other researchers.  Or when planning a future project.  You want them to recall your work.  Something unconnected to anything else doesn't get brought up in conversation. 

Third, writing related work sections can actually be formulaic.  There's an algorithm I think works in most cases:

1. Figure out what topics / techniques / applications / theories define the work contained in your research paper.  These are your keywords.  There might be 2-3 really critical keywords, and maybe a couple more that help define your paper's contribution.  Let's call my keywords A, B, C, and D.
2. Consider the subsets of the keywords.  (Perhaps the theory folks are tuning out now, realizing that this algorithm is 2^n in complexity.  But bear with me.)  Limit this to the few most important, don't try to cover every combination.  For example, you might consider AB, ACD, BCD, and ABC.     
3. What research is published that uses that subset of keywords? Describe the research in one subset, it becomes a paragraph (more or less) of your related work.  This paragraph can start with "The area of XX research uses both A, B, and C to achieve its goals.  <more detail here>.  This paper further adds D which is awesome because YY."

Yes, LaTeX is awesome, and yet is at the intersection of multiple areas of research. 
Image credit: Stefan Kottwitz, http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/venn/

Just a note that every research community has their technical writing style, the norm they expect to see on the page as they read a paper.  My perspective is shaped by ACM/IEEE conferences like MobiCom, IPSN, Sensys, SECON, and others for which the paper is 10-14 pages + references, and as result, there is room in the paper to use a page for the discussion of related work.  Your conference or journal writing norms may vary, please consult with your PhD advisor before submission. Blah blah blah, right?  

Finally, I want to give lots of credit to the authors who write papers, submit them, and get them accepted to conferences.  It's your related work sections that have taught me how to write one.

Hope this helps someone out there write a great related work section and position their hugely awesome idea on paper to be influential in their research community.