The Frustration of the Great Paradox of the Desire to Write (or) The Overuse of Prepositional Phrases

So I have a theory. No one has a desire to write.

One can write, or have no desire to write.

But I have a desire to write. My dilemma is this: I want to write; I want to tell a story. However, I don't have a story to tell. Or rather, if I do, I don't know what it is. I feel like I have a lot of things, bits of stories, parts of characters, portions of scenes...a cloud, if you will, full of stuff that could be found in a story, but no story to speak of.

This evening, Zach came over to eat with us, and while he was here, he let us read and edit a prologue of a story that he is working on for his writing class. There were, honestly speaking, a few things that I thought teetered on the edge of...not hackneyed, but something like that. However, despite those things, I thought the story, overall, was very good. The story had a strong start, and his prose was fantastic, really. As we read it out loud and corrected bits and pieces here and there, I began to realize that I want to write something. I could write something, and I think I could write it well. But I simply can't think of a story to tell. Maybe I'm just not trying hard enough. Maybe it's something I need to focus on all day. Maybe a good story just comes to you, and I need to sit back and let it happen.

Really, the only thing I know is there are a few qualifications that must be met before I feel like I could write a story.

1. The story has to be reasonable. It can not have a grand adventure, and it can not have magic, or supernatural aspects. Nothing out the ordinary, just a story composed of its characters. The plot should simply be a device to advance the characters, not the main attraction
   
2. The story's conflict has to solve itself, so to speak. I have to admit, now that I've had plenty of time to understand the deus ex machina, it's incredibly easy to identify. And it's irksome. I'm not one to say anything, given that I'm not writing, but I think that's the laziest thing a writer can do, to pull a solution out of nothing. If nothing else, work your solution into the story early on. But I think anyone who studies literature will tell you that the solution to the story's conflict has to be born of the conflict itself.
3. The conflict has to be difficult. I know that this makes writing a story so much harder, but in terms of good literature, I hate a conflict that is, if you will, like a wall. The obvious solution would be to go over the wall, and that's the only goal of the entire story. Unless you write a story in such a way that there is some way to go around/under/through the wall, then it can not be a simple, obvious solution. The conflict then, should not be like a wall, but something much more complex.
   
4. I have to have rich characters. No stupid, shallow characters. If there is a person worth having more than about three lines of dialogue in my story, then they need to be important. A reader would need a reason to care about the character, for better or worse. The reader should wonder why the character acts in the way he/she does, or better yet, make a conclusion about the same.

I think this is all I have for now; it's all that comes to mind at the moment. As you may understand at this point, I have plenty of rules for my story, but no story. And that is simply unfulfilling.