Design flow - Writing Process - Logic and Intuition during creative blocks

The problem:

When writing a story, designing a space, creating anything at all, at some point you will encounter a road block.

You may be writing a scene or building an outline and ideas are flowing with ease then for whatever reason they stop. And you...

1) ask what next?
2) put the pen or paintbrush down and walk away

If you find yourself doing 1) ask what next?, you will ask two types of questions...

1) logic based
2) emotion/abstract based

A logic based question might be - "My hero is a coward, so I think I need to add someone courageous into the scene to push him to try to overcome his fear."  or "The picture I'm painting has a lot of red tones, maybe I should add green here to create contrast and make this part a focal point."

And logically, this idea makes sense.  But what happens after you decide that choice is the right direction to head in...

In all likelihood, you find yourself asking "what next?" again.  You haven't broken the obstacle fully and are now creating using Logic.

What to do:

When you first arrive at a creative roadblock...

1) get up and walkaway and be done with it for now.  Focus on cleaning, or helping someone, let the project fall out of your mind for a while
2) ask an emotion/abstract question.
3) Combo of 1) and 2) - find a song, painting, sculpture, photograph, etc. that you like and study it. - what do you like about it?

If you go with 2) ask an emotion/abstract question, you may be more likely to slip back into the creative flow.  An example of an emotion/abstract question is, "What would look cool?"  "What would be a cool character to add to the scene?"  "What would be the worst thing to happen now?"

If you go with 3) the combo,  this too may help you get back into the flow quickly.

The Conclusion

When you hit a creative block, try to avoid falling into the logic trap.  It's easy to fall into the trap, because as you create using intuition, logic feels like an old friend that you haven't been using for a while.  But when you make the switch to logic, you then find yourself creating using logic and the work will feel unauthentic, formulaic, stale, etc.

Emotion in writing a character journey

Stories tend to be about a character who feels a negative emotion.  And they must complete a task in order to quell that emotion.  For instance, a man may feel guilt if he does not confess his sins.  The story would take place with the man trying to not feel guilty but failing until he realizes that he must confess his sins in order to not feel guilty.  The story is a journey to figure out what a character needs to do to control a certain emotion.

Another example could be a man feeling stressed and trying various things to appease that stress only to finally realize that it is work and making money that appeases his stress.  So most of the story could be the man seeking pleasures and not working to relieve stress only to find irony in work and pain relieving his stress.