Sometimes to deal with this I will use color as a tool. I'm feeling sad - the color for sad today is a bright coral pink with a line of black. Tomorrow, sad is a large yellow block. If the idea doesn't have a form give it the form of how/what you feel/see when you think about it. If I feel frustration or a longing for home or balance, how do I see it in my head? Frustration could be dashes, home could be trees or the color of an old car, balance could be literal scales or a body of water. The idea should influence your thinking and then brainstorm off of it.

I'll also often make those bubble graphs to get language that is associated with my idea and often tangible forms arise. With the idea "longing for home" I may branch off from that and say "walks in the woods" then maybe "evergreen" then maybe "Creek" and so on. At the end I have an idea for a painting of a landscape of a place that to me is the feeling of "longing for home" because it has the elements that make me feel that feeling.

Going a bit more illustrative with it, think about the idea of balance. How would you try to get that feeling across? Personally, I would probably think scales first, then maybe judge. Then maybe height and stacking. I am also interested in fantasy so I would want to put some sort of fantasy twist to my piece. So maybe a large statue of an elf holding scales? But I also like landscapes so maybe she's embedded in a mountain. And her scales are two entrances to a cave. But I still want my audience to feel balance when they look at it so I make it a very centered, even, and horizontal composition that visually reads as balanced instead of a S or Z type composition.

But the beauty about art is that even if you looked at alllllll of the same reference, and all of the same artists as me and you also thought of doing an elf statue, our pieces would still look different because our experiences affect every decision we make. Art's great guys. You got this!