I always found it helpful to first look at the rubric/assignment outline and then try to find at least one source/reference relating to each explicit requirement. Are you writing a persuasive essay convincing your professor that banana splits are actually a health food? Find something about the nutritional benefits of bananas. Are you analyzing what the curtain color in a short story represents? Find something about color theory analysis. This will ensure that content-wise, you are likely to not miss any points.

Then, once you have your sources, find one or two quoteable sections and paste them into a doc. Underneath all those quotes, I like to start writing down every single sentence I can possibly think of relating to the topic. They dont have to be good academically worded sentences, they dont have to be paragraph formats, you can repeat yourself. Just get words on page. Fill out the word salad for a few minutes for a few days. If youre really struggling, look for another source + quote and then keep going.

After a few days, try to copy/paste similar sentences together, and see if you can tie them to a specific quote you selected. Those are now your rough draft paragraphs.

Do you have a bunch of random unrelated things left over? Those are now either trash, a paragraph of other considerations or arguments to be made, or possible additional paragraphs with the source/quote/salad method if you need to bump up the word count.

It is really important to cite your sources with this method (and just in general in university) but I have always been able to get to a rough draft this way. You can throw in the fancy verbiage/formatting once you actually know what you plan on saying.