Writer’s block! One of the most dreaded experiences we writers face. Maybe you abruptly lose momentum, or you get the gloomy feeling that everything you put on the page is dumb. Maybe you don’t have a plan for what should happen next. Or you have a plan, but that plan no longer works.
All authors go through this. Of necessity, we develop techniques to break through writer’s block. I’m going to share a few, and maybe you have your own methods to share, too.
First of all, I consider what else is going on in my life. There might be a chore I have to do, or a spat that needs to be sorted out with my family. I give myself permission to step away from writing and take care of whatever that is. Then it won’t be standing in my way any more.
Second, I discipline myself to at least LOOK at the story. There’s always some little tweak that can get me involved with the telling. I read through the final page I did before the block and ask myself, “then what?” Any new words I add might be terrible, but I at least have something to work with later.
Another thing I try is to bring the story into my mind while doing something else. Driving to and from work. Washing dishes. Showering. These are all blank times that I can sometimes persuade my mind to fill up with story.
Lastly, when I lie down to sleep at night, I let my mind wander through the world of the story. Very often, it will spark an idea. I keep a journal near my bed, so I can hop up and write things down.
What about all of you? I’d love to hear your ways to break a writer’s block.
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Wyrmflight 
I’m a plotter, so if I get stuck, I go back to the outline and see if I can figure out what’s not working. That usually gets me unstuck.:-) I’ve done that before-I-fall asleep thing, too, and sometimes creative solutions will pop up by morning!
I remember hearing the apocryphal story that Isaac Asimov, author or editor of more than 500 books and writer of an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards, had writer’s block. It was the worst 30 minutes of his life.
Seriously, this used to be a major problem for me, but much of that was because of how I was taught to write. That was to have everything organized before hand. That rarely works for me. With the first one-act play I wrote that was completed and produced, except for the ending I had no idea what was going to happen in the 30-minute play. I wrote the first draft in 48 hours.
Working as a journalist also helped; if I didn’t get things finished on time, I’d be out of a job.
I’ve done variations of much of what you’ve done, but the best trick I learned was from what Isaac Asimov himself did: always work on more than one project at the same time. Right now I’ve got a book I’m writing, one I’m editing, one I’m getting ready to be published. And I’ve got a short story started, a couple articles, a play, etc. If I start to get stuck on one thing, I either step away from writing as you’ve done, or I switch to a different writing project. I usually switch back and forth from one thing to another, sometimes three or four things, in a single day.
As a result, I haven’t had to deal with writer’s block for many years.
I just finished reading Wandrings on Writing by Jane Lindskold and she makes an interesting distinction between writer’s block and those routine periods that most writers face of getting stuck. She defines writer’s block as a “crippling inability to write.” She describes almost PTSD-like symptoms anytime she tried to put fictional words on a page for weeks. Overcoming it was a process of finding a new story she needed to tell and working through it with baby steps. It’s given me a new perspective on what’s meant by writer’s block. The book, by the way, is one I highly recommend. Lots of great anecdotes and writing advice.