Whether you believe it exists or not. In your writing, or lack there of, you hit a spot where the words stop flowing. How you overcome it has as many variations as there are writers. Don’t be afraid to say one person’s method does not work for you. Move onto another, then another, and most likely another. At some point, you will come across what is stopping the words from flowing out like they should.
I’ve read almost a dozen different ‘How to write’ books, and fifty times that in articles. The only consensus amongst them all is don’t give up, keep writing. The block is obviously you are not sure where to take your story. If you did, you would write and not staring at the page. I cannot remember the list of everything I had tried to get past it. Just the last failure and success.
My failure was trying to think out the problem in my head. Where did I want to take the story, the steps to get there, all steps between, the words to make those steps happen. Unfortunately, my mind liked to race on and off the track. I would lose focus and couldn’t remember anything once I sat to write. Taking that a step further and talking to myself out loud seemed to help focus me. Being super shy and not living alone, that limited how crazy I wanted to look. Also very self-conscious about what I would say. If first drafts are for your eyes, half-baked first thoughts were even more sacred and secret.
Then I found free-writing. When you just type out anything that comes to mind. You probably see where this went. If so, then you were one step ahead of me at this point. I did several free-writing sessions of just writing about my life and feelings, basically journaling. It was not until one day I mentioned in the journaling I was feeling frustrated about not knowing where to take my story.
Since then I have found that typing out the conversation I am having in my head it keeps me focused on the story. As a bonus, I have a written record of the crazy conversation. As added whimsy to using a typewriter now, when I type out my writer’s block, I try to make it a literal block of writing. Margin to margin, no indentations, splitting words at random spots because I hit the right side.