Ray Bradbury has some questions for you

How long has it been since you wrote a story where your real love or your real hatred somehow got on paper?

When was the last time you dared release a cherished prejudice so it slammed the page like a lightning bolt? What are the best things and the worst things in your life, and when are you going to get around to whispering or shouting them?

What do you want more than anything else in the world? What do you love, or what do you hate?

Find a character, like yourself, who will want something or not want something, with all their heart. Give them running orders. Shoot them off. Then follow as fast as you can go.

The character, in their great love or hate, will rush you through to the end of the story. The zest and gusto of their need, and there is zest in hate as well as love, will fire the landscape and raise the temperature of your typewriter thirty degrees.

Everywhere you look in the literary cosmos, the great ones are busy loving or hating. Have you given up on this primary business as obsolete in your own writing?

What fun you are missing, then. The fun of anger and disillusion, the fun of love and being loved, of moving and being moved by this masked ball which dances us from cradle to churchyard.

Life is sure, misery inevitable, mortality certain.

But on the way, why not carry zest and gusto.