A few things I've noticed about writer's block, from sitting through it more times than I'd care to admit:
Writer's block almost always traces back to one specific paragraph, or one character decision, or the vague sense that what you're making isn't what you imagined. The whole draft isn't stuck. One part is stuck, and that part has convinced you the rest is broken too.
Philip Roth once described his process as "turning sentences around," sitting at his desk and rearranging the same few lines for hours. He estimated that he produced about a page a day on his good stretches. On the bad ones, he'd write and discard the equivalent of entire novels. What looked from the outside like a block was, from the inside, a relentless overproduction of material that didn't meet some internal standard he couldn't fully articulate even to himself.
Most writer's block tips tell you to lower the stakes. Write badly on purpose. Give yourself permission to fail. This is good advice. It also almost never works in the moment, because the person who is blocked already knows they should lower the stakes and can't figure out how.
Raymond Chandler had a rule for the days he couldn't write. He didn't have to write, but he wasn't allowed to do anything else. He could sit at his desk and stare at the wall. He could look out the window. But no reading, no letters, no tidying. Just the desk, the typewriter, and boredom. He found that after enough boredom, writing became the most interesting option available.
The block often lives in the transition between knowing what you want to say and figuring out the first sentence. Once you have the first sentence, even a bad one, the second comes easier. And by the third you've usually forgotten you were stuck. Starting is the whole problem. The middle takes care of itself.
Anne Lamott's advice in Bird by Bird was to write "shitty first drafts," and the word shitty was doing real work in that sentence. She wasn't saying write a rough draft. She was saying write something you'd be embarrassed to show anyone, something genuinely bad, because the willingness to be that bad is the only way through. The first draft, she wrote, is the "child's draft," where you let it all pour out and remind yourself that no one is ever going to see it.
I'm not entirely sure writer's block is one thing. The feeling of being stuck on a novel at page 200 has almost nothing in common with the feeling of staring at a blank page before you've started. We use the same phrase for both, which might be part of why the advice never quite lands.
Neil Gaiman's suggestion was to pretend you're someone who can write, and then sit down and do what that person would do. There's something genuinely useful buried in that, because much of being blocked is an identity problem. You've temporarily stopped believing you're a person who produces sentences. Gaiman's trick sidesteps the belief question entirely. You don't need to believe anything. Just act it out and see what happens.
Maya Angelou rented a hotel room to write in, a small bare room with a Bible, a dictionary, a deck of cards, and a bottle of sherry. She'd arrive at 6:30 in the morning and write until early afternoon. The room had no distractions because she'd made sure of that. What people miss about this story is that she needed the room at all. One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century couldn't reliably write at home. She had to build an environment so stripped down that writing was the only remaining activity. That tells you something about how persistent the resistance is, even for people operating at that level.