Sometimes, "block" means complete shutdown. In other cases, he simply stops writing what he wants to write. He may manage other kinds of writing, but not the kind he sees as his vocation.

Have you ever gotten Blogger's Block?

Every day for years, Trollope reported in his “Autobiography,” he woke in darkness and wrote from 5:30 a.m. to 8:30 a.m., with his watch in front of him.

That's a strategy.

He required of himself two hundred and fifty words every quarter of an hour.

How about, say, 5 posts per quarter hour? (3 minutes each?)

Many readers now believed that literature was something produced by fine-minded, unhappy people who did not hunt, and to this audience his recommendations seemed clear evidence of shallowness.

Are high-volume bloggers necessarily shallow?

The second was a tremendous surge in ambition on the part of American artists -- a lot of talk about the Great American Novel and hitting the ball out of the park. Some of those hopes were fulfilled.

Blockbusters, in the 1940's!

They have reason to be jumpy, though. Writing is a nerve-flaying job. Apart from the effort, there is the self-exposure.

At least with old-fashioned books, you can't do a full-text search and a link analysis of the entire library in 0.10 seconds.

Why do writers stop writing?