This is my workbook. I look forward to its big, blank pages. This is my blueprint-in-progress. A palette to mix colors, oversized cardstock for pasting down a collage. This is my word smithery, my what-if tavern, my kingdom of lost souls, my hide-and seek tundra. Horizon, horizontal, lines, lies. A choreography, a wild, improvisational dance, a chalice for the dream state. Call it a dream catcher. Sell it in New Age stories. The holes are invisible.

I walk the dog to the backdoor. Outside, the sky is bluing. The clouds blow in the chill air. A hole opens up in the sky, fingered apart by the whispy clouds, and there, small opal, is the moon, white and two-thirds visible to the naked eye. Dream state, a la Robert Olen Butler, brought to me by Bandit, my dog, patron saint of the incestuous love of hope and fear.

On these lined pages, I roar. Stomp. Trumpet. Trample. The world is full of stories and desires. It is admitting to them and listening to them that takes the work. Courage. I, for one, trained myself to look for safety, to spot it darting by and lock it with my eye to the far edge of the horizon, then turn for the next sighting. A lot of work to keep a safe narrative going. Why now should I let the frightening and the frightened ugly truth come in? Easier to dismiss it as melodrama, a false conceit, than to take it in, a foster child well past the age of adoption, and learn to love its ugliness to the point of transformation. For story is that transformation.

Someone said, “Reality is my higher power.” That takes courage, to get down on your knees in front of the world as it is—rot, disease, exquisite beauty, love, rejection, casual one-night stands, failure, will, blossoms, spiders, a stretch of blue sky, storms the wrath of our imbalance, four doves standing by the pothole at the cul-de-sac, the book—a thing of beauty—that no one wants to read, the child, demanding, ungrateful, beautiful, capable of raw love or programmed for it. The writer sits before it all, the blank page an invitation to what we least want to know, to our fears, to the intricate enormity of our own capacity to pay attention, which is to say, to love.

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Story Makers Show: What do you get when you cross a novelist and a screenplay writer? An 80 page outline of a movie! Author Jacqueline Luckett always dreamed of her book being turned into a movie, and now a known actress has bought the screenplay. Check out this week’s podcast at http://StoryMakersShow.com or on iTunes or Stitcher!