I am at a creative standstill.
The worst part of driving along the road of creativity is coming to a roadblock.
I have no idea how to be brilliant on the spot. The only time I come up with good ideas is when I'm not thinking of them. A few months ago, I got a really crazily scary idea for a creature design while walking around my sunny neighborhood looking at flowers.

I am currently working on a creative project with friends, and I am frustrated at our lack of productivity. I don't mean competency to turn out work, but rather creative productivity. We are still in the planning/conceptual stage, and we have tried our hardest to think of good ideas. We are all very talented, hard-working, innovative critical thinkers. I think that we are all so passionate about what we do that we tend to overthink and put too much pressure on ourselves. We—or rather, I, as I really should only speak for myself—tend to dive into a project and lose sense of direction. I envelope myself in the thoughts and feelings surrounding it to the point of losing objectivity. I don't consider myself a creator who easily get emotionally attached to certain designs or ideas. If I want to work as a commercial artist, I need to be able to stand back from ideas, either mine or someone else's, and view it as science. I need to appraise what is right and what is wrong without any favor towards or against anything. As stolid and scientific as I am, this is somehow very, very hard. I don't think it's because I am attached to individual ideas so much as I am attached to the idea of succeeding. Not wanting to fail makes me so dedicated to succeeding that I have trouble molding and shaping the clay into what it will become. I just see a big hunk of clay on the table and think, "I don't want to screw it up. Let's just work with it the way it is."

No, that metaphor doesn't make sense. A better example for how we're doing now is that we're all looking at this blank canvas. Pure white, not a lick of paint to be seen. And we keep talking about what we could paint, and we talk some more. Then we nix some ideas and build up others. Then we tweak some stuff. Then we scrap it all and start over. Meanwhile, we could have turned out two or three small prototype paintings to see what might work and give it a shot.

We're overthinkers, that's for sure. I am especially. In my own art, I do the same thing. I plan out each detail ad nauseum. Not only does this waste time that could be spent actually creating, but I also set the standard way too high for myself. If I can see each little detail in my head, I set myself up for failure when those details don't materialize on the canvas like I hoped. I also prevent any chance of happy accidents because anything that strays from my vision is automatically deemed a flaw. There is no experimenting or improvisation allowed when the blueprint is set in marble.

We need to just... make something.
walking + talking > talking