Here I am back in my hometown of Chicago, slouching toward the birth of the new year, the year in which I’ll hit the big four-oh. Maybe it’s too soon to start in with the hand-wringing that usually accompanies the reaching of the rough middle point of one’s journey across this great green and blue rock. But navel gazing is a specialty of us writer-types, especially those of us educated by the MFA writing program industry.

Midlife crises are nothing new to me. I’ve been having them on and off since my teens when a sudden growth spurt ended my unlikely gymnastics career. I then turned to tennis, the Chicago Board of Options Exchange, a stint with a rock band, a pair of failed attempts at the Foreign Service Exam, three stabs over a fifteen year period at writing a Great American Novel, a solid near miss at writing for the screen and my current preoccupation with making a (low-budget) feature film of some sort.

Most of these endeavors have involved storytelling of one form or another. Partner that with my career in public relations and institutional communications, and it involves a whole lot of fiction. In short: bullshit. This penchant for stories arises mainly from a hell of a lot of movies and books over the years. I love both of these forms, and not a few of them have changed the course of my life as I’ve struck out in a new direction dragging my wife and kid along as I go. Books are dangerous and powerful things. Sometimes. Other times they put you to sleep. Often, at their best, they just make you smile and lay the pages in your lap, closing your eyes and savoring the funny way they make your brain feel.

Storytelling is an art and a craft and a compulsion. Some people do it really, really well. Some are just pretty good. Most suck at it. I haven’t quite figured out where I fit on that spectrum. What I do know, though, is that I’ve run out of roughly half of the time endowed to me to find out. And now the chances will grow slimmer with each passing minute. This doesn’t frighten or frustrate me that much. Sure I sense the sand slipping through the hourglass. But I’m also starting to approach an acceptance of the fact that I may never really know.

As a writer, I’ve been good enough to show well in a contest here or there. Outside my day job, I’ve earned a grand total of less than five thousand dollars for my scribblings. Not bad, actually. How many people have hobbies that pay them back? How many people approach, say, the watching of television like a part-time job? Instead, I tell stories. Sometimes people read them. Sometimes they even pay me for them.

Add to that a few plane tickets to LA, and one dinner in particular in Santa Monica that I recall where a producer asked me, without irony, who I’d like to play the lead role in the film of a screenplay I’d written. “What about Leonardo DiCaprio?” I asked. The producer frowned. I thought he might laugh. But he didn’t. He was thinking. “No,” he said, “don’t think we could get him. Who else?”

That film didn’t get produced. Neither did the next half dozen scripts I wrote outside of one short film, which I made myself with the help of friends. That turned out to be one of the more exhilarating storytelling experiences in this long, ambling and not very lucrative part-time career.

And while all of this other stuff was going on, this reading and writing and filmmaking, etc, I’ve wound up having a fairly rewarding actual career in another aspect of the bullshit biz. I’ve clawed my way up to middle management in a PR shop for a state institution, which sounds quite horrid but actually isn’t. I have no problems punching a clock, growing up as I did in a union household. My old man counted money in a dingy, smoky vault below crooked horse tracks under the direction of a state racing commission and various and occasionally nefarious wealthy families. For fun he golfs, dotes on a fancy car and for many years cared for and operated a speedboat, treating a host of family and friends to lake holidays over the years.

Instead of speedboating, I make up stories in my spare time. Instead of planning the union picnic, I make super low-budget movies. My endeavors may be a tad Quixotic compared to my father’s and his race track friends’, but they’re no less enjoyable.

I don’t want to give the actual, paying job short shrift. I’ve had some nice rewards, not the least of which being health benefits and a steady paycheck that over the years has enabled world travel and helped with the acquisition of not a few nice bottles of wine. We sent our daughter to a solid private preschool. Cutting corners means forgoing a vacation rental in favor of tent  camping or putting off buying a new lens for my camera for a month or two. We’re not rich. We’ll never be rich. But, right now, anyway, we’re not hurting.

And building websites and helping put together marketing campaigns online has brought some creative satisfaction and a bit of recognition. It amuses me that I get to travel around the country and give presentations to folks about some of the things I do on a job I never expected or wanted in the first place. That’s not to say I don’t appreciate or enjoy said job. It’s just that I always thought I’d be doing something else. Like cashing checks from New York publishers or Los Angeles producers.

But I’ve learned that this isn’t really how the world works. Maybe for some people, but not for the vast majority. As I slouch toward forty, I’m realizing that this kind of sucks, but then it’s also not really that bad. If I could have my choice of a career, I’d be sitting in a book-stuffed cabin near Sisters, Oregon with a view of the three volcanic peaks, hacking away at a vintage typewriter, amassing pages, which I’d slip into an envelope and send to an agent. Every so often, a check would come in the mail. I’d occasionally get up to split wood and feed the fireplace. I’d pick my daughter up from school and then fix dinner for the family. In the evenings we’d watch Francis Ford Coppola movies or I’d actually have time to read the New Yorker weekly. On weekends I’d fish for trout or sketch landscapes. Maybe I’d take photographs of flowers with a macro lens.

But that’s not how it works. Maybe reaching forty means that you begin to accept and realize what’s fantasy and what’s not. Right now my goals are less ambitious than the National Book Awards or the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. I’d like to get a little nicer house so that we can have guests without feeling cramped. I’d like a six-burner stove and more time to cook. I’d like to be a little less stressed at work and have a little more time to engage in bullshit artistry: I’d like to take a shot at another novel or script. Maybe one will be something I’m really, really pleased with, whether or not it’s ever published or produced. I want to fish more, go backpacking with my daughter, and increase the number of times per year that my wife and I take in dinner and a show.

All of these goals seem reasonable. I even hope to accomplish one or two of them in 2011. And the rest should be easily attainable sometime over the next forty years.

If you answered yes to any of the questions above, you’re probably still in learning mode. Most screenwriting bloggers recommend moving to LA if you’re serious about a career so that you can immerse yourself in the industry and make connections. Some will heed that advice and others won’t, but either way it’s a long, hard road to get a feature script that you’ve written filmed and distributed. The odds are pretty much against you. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try. But it does mean that you should be doing everything you can to learn about filmmaking.

Ultimately, the best way for a writer to learn is to simply write and rewrite scripts. Words and story are your tools, and you have to know how to handle them better than anyone else on a project. But another way to to learn is to make a short film. Like writing, it can be done anywhere. If you do it yourself, it’ll cost you a couple thousand bucks, and it might not turn out very well, but it will provide an education.

I’m working on my first short film now, and it’s an education. I’ve got one feature script in development, and I’ve written several full-length scripts that have fared well, but a short film is another matter altogether. Our project is already up to a cast of 15 plus extras, and a crew of at least 10 (if we can find enough volunteers). You look at a script differently when you’re trying to meet a budget. Or when you have to rewrite to adapt to a location that is different from what you originally envisioned. You learn about things like gaff tape (and what it’s for), camera dollies, cranes, and how catering, snacks and coffee are at least as important as what camera you use.

This isn’t something you can do on your own as a screenwriter. But if you’re outside LA, you’d be surprised how easy it is to get the interest of volunteers. You’ll need experienced partners. And it’ll take months of your free time. But you’ll learn a few things about filmmaking and you’ll be able to talk intelligently about the myriad of issues that producers have to deal with, from working with a budget to casting to managing a large crew. And when you’re asked to rewrite to address any of these issues, you’ll do so with complete understanding and empathy.

I’ll blog this summer about the progress of our little project. Of course we’re entering with the typical hubristic notion of showing in film festivals, winning all sorts of awards and sending it off to Sundance. But even if it sucks, I’ve already learned a bunch about filmmaking that I didn’t know after years of writing and revising.

One exercise to develop your sense of place is to sit on a rotting log in the woods for four hours. The Oregon coastal rainforest is a perfect location.

Creating a sense of place is different in all three forms of writing that I do. In film, you’re leaving hints. In a script, you can’t overdo it on the description…a screenplay needs to be spare and have enough room for the director and producers to fill in the details for how they want this film to feel and look. You need to just hint at the sense of place. And you need to do it in one and two word bursts throughout the script. It’s hard to do. I’ve been working with a patient director who has helped me hack away everything extraneous from the screenplay. But through our conversations, I can tell that he is seeing much more than what I’ve put on the page…he’s filling out the vision for the film. That’s his job, not entirely mine, and as a screenwriter I need to remember that fact.

In fiction, the task of creating a sense of place falls entirely to the writer. There won’t be a production designer, a sound designer and a director of photography to help you color in the details. You need to taste the air that your characters breathe. You need to know the names of the flowers and hear the calls of the local birds. You need to know what it smells like after it rains or understand the way a dust storm leaves a dry rattle in the back of your throat (even if you fabricate these details via imagination). The way I try to create a sense of place in prose is through details. Sometimes I’m lucky enough to know the setting well enough and the details are conveniently on hand. I always order a field guide to the local flora and fauna for every place that I write about in ficiton. I’ll read the geological history. You need to know how the crust of the Earth was formed beneath the place that carries your story. All of this is challenging for opposite reasons from screenwriting. In both mediums, it’s difficult.

Now that I’m working on comics, I’m finding a new way to create a sense of place. While fiction is created by an individual and film by a team collaboration, comics seem to be a partnership. And the artist creates the tone and emotion from the sense of place that happens in a story, but it has to also resonate with the narrative. And it keys on the panel descriptions you give to the artist…these are words that will never be read by the audience…they will be interpreted by the artist and presented via his visual style. It’s tricky, and I’m not exactly sure how the process works yet, though I’m pleased with the results we have so far.

A sense of place is a foundation for any narrative. I don’t know how other writers develop their skills for creating a place for a story. For me, I think I cultivate this sensitivity through spending as much time in the natural world as I can. Like Thoreau, you’d do well to sit on an old stump in the woods for four hours and feel how the forest changes around you. Unfortunately, I haven’t been doing this nearly as much as I should lately. Life has a tendency to get in the way. But the sun is finally out in Oregon, and I know I’ll soon be packing a tarp into the woods to spend a night or two curled up next to a rotting log or on the edge of an alpine lake.