How do you deal with writers' block?

[Jubal]

Thoughts welcome! I don't have enormous writers' block at the moment but I feel like I'm struggling a bit. It's a long time now (about three years) since I finished writing my last book-length fiction project, which is still unpublished, and I think the bad experiences of trying to work out publication have soured me a bit on writing in general, I've been managing about one short story a year and occasional bits of chain writing in the meantime but I'd like to get back to writing more fiction. It's also difficult when my job is already so text and writing heavy.

So thoughts on how to get round the mental boulders and get fictiony words on pages welcome

[Spritelady]

When you have writer's block, do you find you struggle to sit down and get started, or is that fine you just find you regularly dislike what you've written/feel compelled to delete it all and start over?

I find I struggle more with the former, and oddly, my usual solution to the issue is to wait until I've had a small idea, whatever it may be, and then sit down with the document in front of me just to make a note of it. Ie I don't sit down with the intention of spending time writing. And then I often find once I've written the idea down, I expand on it, or I get another idea and I almost trick my brain into getting into the flow of writing.

I mostly struggle with block when it comes to planning sessions for DnD, since I don't fiction write all that often, so I think it's often the boring admin (setting DCs or coming up with loot etc) that puts me off, and this seems to help get around that.

Anyone else's thoughts on this would also be appreciated, since once upon a time, I did have a lot of fiction ideas I wanted to actually write out!

[dubsartur]

I don't struggle from writer's block, more often I struggle with making myself work on something that pays or fills another life need when I want to write the thing I want to write about.  I still have not published the book I basically finished in 2021 because of all the admin tasks I would need to get it with a publisher.

I mostly struggle with block when it comes to planning sessions for DnD, since I don't fiction write all that often, so I think it's often the boring admin (setting DCs or coming up with loot etc) that puts me off, and this seems to help get around that.

Anyone else's thoughts on this would also be appreciated, since once upon a time, I did have a lot of fiction ideas I wanted to actually write out!

Yeah, some versions of D&D involve a lot of arithmetic and details for the GM.

[Jubal]

I don't struggle from writer's block, more often I struggle with making myself work on something that pays or fills another life need when I want to write the thing I want to write about.

I think this may be partly what I think of as writers' block, in that often I'm trying to write a particular thing but my brain isn't in that particular space and maybe I could write something else but I'd feel bad about doing so because I ought to be writing this thing. I'd be more productive if my brain was allowed to do whatever it wanted more of the time, but what I'd produce would be pretty much random.

When you have writer's block, do you find you struggle to sit down and get started, or is that fine you just find you regularly dislike what you've written/feel compelled to delete it all and start over?

Like yourself, it's very much the former for me. Recently I've been trying to do bits of writing where I just mentally freeze because I'm stressed and tired and it's all too much to get words started at all. And I think I use similar strategies to you: I note things down then try to organically build out from those notes. But I think it can sometimes be tricky to do longer bits of storytelling or academic writing that way.

I think it's often the boring admin (setting DCs or coming up with loot etc) that puts me off

Also strong empathy here. For one of my many unfinished projects, the Kavis rulebooks, I've got for example much of the text of the bestiary written but almost none of the stat-blocks for the monsters done.