Nope. Embrace it. If you're drained, it means there's stuff you're not dealing with in "real" life. So deal with it in your fiction until it makes the quantum leap. You'll be a better person for it.
I'm all about the characters. You have to create people (or animals, or aliens) your readers care about. They should pop off the page and squirm into the readers' heads and walk around in there, challenging old perspectives and punching out new boundaries.
I've been writing since I was about six years old. At that age I was attracted by the prize. I won a dollar in a newspaper contest. Sixty years later it's not about the money, thank goodness! It's about telling a good story. It's about telling the truth in a palatable way. It's about saying what the readers can't bring themselves to say or feel, and evoking a response of "This is my story. Somebody's speaking for me."
