The trick — and it’s imperfect and can take a while, but — is simply to write something else. Don’t let your hands go cold. Don’t let yourself stop thinking. Shift to something different. I think it was Robert Silverberg who used to do his (type)written correspondence on bad days, and then “trick” himself into writing by slipping manuscript paper into the machine once his fingers were flying.
It’s about letting your backbrain chew on the problems while your frontbrain is amused by the new and shiny things. Find an essay to write. Do some flash fiction, or a short story, or a novelette about dancing gravediggers written in the style of Cormac McCarthy. An audiobook about dirigible vampires who shit sexy babies down chimneys. Whatever. I’ve read of several writers from eras past who would type out passages from their favourite writers, to get a feeling of what it’s like to make sentences like that.
Write something else. Anything else. Either you’ll solve the problem in the background, or get the taste back for what you’re stuck on — or, guess what, maybe that whole thing was dead and you were just shoving electrodes up it to make it twitch in an awful semblance of life the whole time. I mean, that happens. It doesn’t mean you were blocked, it means that you were zapping a big stinky corpse with all your electricity and wondering why it wasn’t sitting up and calling you Mummy. It was dead. Bury it and never speak of what you did to it again.
From here.
One of the lessons I’ve learned this year, in terms of writing, is to recognize when things aren’t working and be okay with just starting over. It normally happens with the Time pieces, although SpinOff has had more than a few, as well; depressingly, it usually only occurs to me right at the end, when I realize that it’s really not coming together like I’d hoped, and I also realize that I’ve wasted a lot of time in trying to make it work. There’s a depressing moment where I want to give up because, wow, that was a lot of time/effort down the drain and the deadline is now even closer, but instead, I start over and hope for better with Attempt #2. Or #3. Or #4.