Every creative act begins somewhere in the vicinity of play — the 'what if,' the experiment that no one is allowed to call a failure yet, the draft that exists only to be wrong. Nasreddin solved problems by playing with them first: turning them upside down, importing them from other contexts, checking whether they still looked like problems from a different angle. The creative block is usually just the refusal to play; the cure is usually just to start.
Each step builds on the last.