My process as a writer is messy. It’s made of equal parts exhilaration and despair, moments of wanting to chuck it all, followed by renewed determination. I’ve been in a Dosi-do for the last four months as I plow through revisions of my 282-page novel interspersed with wedding preparations – an equally consuming effort – twirling in a dance with real life.

“Dreams don’t work unless you do” sums up my dilemma – and my opportunity – perfectly. I found this quote in a Sacramento arts and crafts store during a shopping trip with my daughter Meghan. I snapped a photo of the quote to remind myself that “butt in the chair,” as Anne Lamott often reminds us, is the vital ingredient.

I have big dreams for Co-opted: A Novel of Manners, about the misadventures of my mid-life protagonist Clarissa in an Oakland co-housing community. Clarissa searches for a utopian solution to her empty nest blues. Finding a way to live harmoniously with strangers proves an order of magnitude more challenging than she imagines – everything from shared dinners for 23, to a communal laundry room where her sweaters shrink to the size of tea towels, to raging arguments over property taxes and finances.

I’ve just finished the sixth round of revisions. But that understates the case. I’ve rewritten the opening three dozen times. I’ve had half a dozen beta readers, two writing groups, feedback from agents, suggestions from writing teachers. I even used a developmental editor after my second draft to refine the narrative arc and character development. The work is daunting. But what ends up stopping me every time is fear.

Fear that bringing to life a complex group of characters in a gritty urban setting is simply beyond me. Fear that I can’t sink deep enough or be vulnerable enough to get to the heart of the story. It’s a head fake, I know, but too often that’s my inner monologue.

Annie Dillard writes, “A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a. halter, but which you now can’t catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength.”

In her book, The Writing Life, Dillard advises visiting the lion every day to reassert your mastery over it. Yet, somehow, life seems to have a way of getting between me and the beast and I spend too many days away so that when I return, I’m “afraid to open the door to its room,” as Dillard writes. The trick is to leap over the distractions, the obstacles that day to day life artfully place’s in the writer’s path and keep going.

Thankfully, I have companions along the way, folks who face similar challenges and find ways to overcome them. My writing communities, The Writers Grotto and Left Margin Lit, both provide protected space where I can work. In these places I find support, as well as a wealth of shared craft knowledge. In moments of discouragement, I turn to my peers, and to the long line of writers before me, including Dillard, and send up a prayer for help. Miraculously, the surefooted goddess of determination eventually comes to my aid.

So here I sit in an Italian villa on a working vacation/honeymoon with my husband of one week. After months of planning and the joy and adrenaline surges of our wedding day, I’m beginning to settle. To breathe. I’m protected by poplar and olive trees, surrounded by the rolling hills and undulating fields of the Tuscan countryside, in a small group of writers all devoted to the craft.

Maybe here, at last, I can summon my inner lion tamer and enter the world of the novel again with renewed courage. It is an immense privilege to do the work; the trick is to remain unattached to any specific outcomes, to let the lion roar as I back it into its corner, and trust that we’ll both come out alive.

Photo on <a href=”https://visualhunt.com/re6/c0d83305″>Visualhunt</a>