Gore Vidal's writing routine was simple: "First coffee, then a bowel movement, then the Muse joins me." Not for him the agonies of staring at a blank page and wondering how to fill it.

Many, however, are less fortunate. Dan Brown last week revealed the device he uses to beat writer's block: a table to which he straps himself by the ankles, and is then rotated until he is hanging upside down. "The more you do it, the more you let go. And then, soon, it's just, wow," he said. Apparently he also has a pair of gravity-defying boots that achieve the same effect.

One might be tempted to mock, but while Brown has taken things to extremes, there is nothing funny about the condition. To be rid of this curse, who knows what lengths any of us would go to. I heard one heartless novelist on the radio scoffing at the very notion of writer's block, as if it were a cover-up for laziness, or a luxury for those who do not have busy lives around which to arrange their writing. She sounded like those aggravatingly smug types who say that they never get ill, because they just don't have the time for it. Tell that to Marie Curie, or Sir Walter Scott, or Stephen Hawking.

When it comes to writer's block, it's no surprise that those in my own profession can be particularly condescending, as if meeting a word count and an imminent deadline is a sign of moral superiority, rather than merely a different skill. Deep down, though, most journalists know there is a world of a difference between filling the pages of a newspaper and the writer's task of creating a world out of nothing. I do, however, recall a feature writer many years ago, at another newspaper, who suffered writer's block. Her colleagues and her long-suffering editor tiptoed around her as if she were an invalid, in the hope she would recover. It seemed to me a good subject for a short story, though I could never think how to begin it.

Among many famous victims of this condition, a man who demolishes the myth that it is imaginary or self-indulgent, was Joseph Mitchell, the New Yorker writer and author of the legendary Joe Gould's Secret, about an eccentric oral historian in Greenwich Village with severe writer's block. Mitchell published his memoir in 1965, but the very act of writing about a man who went to extraordinary lengths to hide the fact he couldn't write seems to have transferred the problem to himself, because thereafter he never published another book.

For 30 years, Mitchell would appear at The New Yorker, dressed in suit and fedora, and go to his office. As his colleague Roger Angell later wrote, "Not much typing was heard from within, and people who called on Joe reported that his desktop was empty of everything but paper and pencils. When the end of the day came, he went home. Sometimes, in the evening elevator, I heard him emit a small sigh, but he never complained, never explained."

Most of us think of writer's block as an inability to fill the page, but I did not realise it can also be applied to writers who look at what they've written and think it is terrible, even when it is not. Block seems an odd word for this loss of confidence or inability to stand back and appraise what one's done. Yet if it prevents the author sending their work out, or showing it to others, I suppose it is effectively as much of a block as an empty page – in some ways perhaps more so.

Fortunately, this condition is treatable. Strategies include keeping a journal, or writing the moment you've woken up, before you've spoken to anyone, read a newspaper, or listened to the radio. My favourite, though, is Beryl Bainbridge's tactic. When faced with this problem, she would open a Dickens novel and at random type one of his sentences. Thereafter, the sluice was opened and her own words flowed freely. Even journalists might find that useful.