It's a tricky place to be in! Figuring out what motivates you and helps you get over the fear is always a super-personal question, and I'm not the most focused person ever myself, so I get that. A few thoughts that might help based on what I'm hearing about your struggles:

Reduce your scope: It sounds like you're gravitating toward settings and premises that are pretty expansive, when you haven't built stamina up for that yet. Short comics or scenes may help you build the confidence and practice that you need to make it to longer ones! Try something that only uses one character in one location and see what happens, then go from there!

Set a time limit: Set a timer for a couple hours and make a comic in that time, using stick figures and scribbles if necessary. It's not enough time to make something AMAZING, but you might surprise yourself and come up with a good starting point that you can flesh out later. It's always easier for me to fix something bad than starting from a blank canvas.

Group Accountability: The group accountability of things like 24-hour Comic Day, Inktober or Nanowrimo/Nanomango is something that really helped me when I was starting out, but even coworking in a Discord server or starting a group call with friends can help achieve that. Knowing that other artists were doing the same thing at the same time and they wanted to see/celebrate my work as much as I wanted to see/celebrate theirs was a great feeling and made me feel less alone!

It's actually okay if it's not a comic!: Some people honestly just like worldbuilding and rotating the blorbos in their head. If the IDEA of having a comic sounds nice, but the physical drawing of comics is not fun for you, you don't have to do it. There may be other outlets like TTRPG writing or video games that suit your ideas better anyway!

Best of luck to you!!

Love Delphina's breakdown of tips and suggestions!

I'll reflect a little from my personal experience. Your post made me think of something I wrote in response to a friend, shortly after I started working on my webcomic Now Recharging. It's a bit more from the sense of "how do you know what you're working on is worthwhile" but there's a lot of overlapping sentiments on finding your way with a project and letting it out into the world. In case it's helpful: https://maiji.tumblr.com/post/144452495784/yuhiurameshi-how-the-hell-do-you-know-that-the

Back when I posted that, I had just started Now Recharging for a few months (around half a year, I think). I'm now looking back at that post around 7 years later with a finished webcomic of over 500 pages. It's not perfect, but I learned a lot working on it, and I did it, and it's out there!

There's this old story I remember reading when I was a kid - "throw your hat over the fence". The gist is that if you come across a fence you want to get around, throw your hat over it. Then you'll have to figure out a way to get around the fence. In other words, do one thing that is a step you can't backtrack on, so that you need to figure out and take the next steps.

For me this meant that, once I figured out "just enough" to be able to start drawing actual pages (e.g., knew who the main character was, their name, their situation, what they and their world generally looks like), I started posting them publicly. This started to make the entire project real, and then other things started getting more real more quickly, and then I had other problems and questions I had to solve, and I would figure it out as I went along. I didn't really have a strong sense of "direction" aside from an overarching mood and theme, and I figured I would figure it out and not sweat too much over planning everything down to the nines (is that the right saying? lol) before I start.

Now, this was more feasible because of the nature of the story I was crafting over time - episode slice-of-life that gradually reveals a bigger cohesive theme. I talk a bit more about this in this post, under the last section "Commitment over time". https://nowrecharging.com/comic/behind-the-scenes-the-process-behind-now-recharging/ This is an approach I felt a little more comfortable in because I had been unknowingly developing experience with it over many years... in fanworks! Over a lengthy period of time before I started working on Now Recharging, when I was writing fanfiction and drawing fancomics, I had this approach in my work where I really enjoyed planting little seeds of things in stories without having a clear sense of what they might be used for, but then later being able to build on them and expand them into other things, and continuing to build and build and grow a world organically. And that I enjoyed creating short little pieces that, in retrospect, can be strung together to create a bigger experience.

I'm sure you know this already, but a reminder when it comes to creative work (and lots of other things to be honest...) - don't treat anything as gospel! If it works for you, it works. If it doesn't work for you, it doesn't work. The above is what worked for me. Try whatever resonates, and if it doesn't work out, there are many other things to try! There's no one way for anyone... and that includes yourself. Sometimes it may just be where you are at a certain point in your life, and how an idea or approach is presented, how it hits you and suddenly makes more sense than it did the 5, 10, 50 times you saw it before. We're always changing as people, we can come back to things we've come across before and see them in a new light with a new understanding. I don't believe I could have created what I create today ten years ago, without the experiences I had leading up to wherever I am today.

I hope this helps, and I wish you well on your wonder-ful creative journey!

Man I tried to write you my story last night and the site ate it, so I'm going to try again.

I grew up as a sketch artist, and eventually came to a point where I wrote all kinds of stories. This process led me to drawing images of characters within my stories to help solidify what they looked like, to capture their personality, or to capture a moment in the story for posterity. Along that way I tried a few efforts at making comics. By hand, on a piece of paper seemed tedious and limited.

After the internet became a thing, I met several fellow writers on a site called PBO, and one of them was one of our oldest members KEZ. I'm not quite sure how we got on the subject, however, she encouraged me to put my stories in graphic form.

At first I didn't think much of it, but the idea grew large in my brain over time, and I decided I wanted to take another stab at it. One reason was because I thought it could spotlight my written works and result (hopefully) into more sales of books. So, I settled on a story, bought a simple tablet, and got a digital art program, and jumped in with both feet. Doing all that at the same time was challenging, but I started to turn out pages for Gemutations: Plague. A few months later, bitten by the webcomic bug, I started a second comic The Only Half Saga. There was no going back after that. At one point I was turning out pages for five different comics (Don't ask, I have no idea how I got there, or even why I thought it was a good idea.). I have since settled into generating pages for the two long form comics I have still running.

The benefits were evident early on, as using these new techniques taught me so much about color and shading and environments. These things I was learning in the digital environment I could then reverse engineer into my sketch work for better results there as well. I didn't get to see my improvement really until I redid the first chapter of Plague and the night and day difference between the quality of the art became apparent.

It's been a ride, but I've loved every minute of it! I don't know if my journey has anything that will help you, but I hope it does.