Is it Writer’s Block?

I don’t know if there’s a difference between writer’s block and simply being in a spot where you don’t know how to take the story forward. Can’t-see-a-way-forward is where I have been lately and before. If I  try to just sit and think my situation through, my mind cavitates – like it can’t think w/o a crutch – but if I sit down with a legal pad and climb up Jack’s beanstalk for an aerial view of the story, and my characters, and on-paper I write-out how they think and what they have done so far, something begins to clarify and I begin to see what else I can make happen in the story that matches how I want the story to feel. One hears how endings are hard. A truism. In endings, because you have troweled-out all the ground work 20 chapters ago, your options at the end of the story have narrowed and every plot choice you make, everything each character does now could turn out to be a serious “pilot error.” A yellow-paper legal pad is a really good place to crank through blind-alley options w/o beating your brains out in hard-written M/S sequences that you end up having to agonize over and ruthlessly and cruelly delete later.