What kind of work did you do before?
I actually had a 6 year gap in my work history before, but I got lucky, found some freelance work through on an old freelancer site, and then 6 months later ended up getting hired at a proper salaried job. It took some effort to massage the resume to fill in the gap though.
Now I've repeated a gap, but only 2 years, so hopefully not as painful to rectify.