What I've learned about writing a short story

Over the past month that we've been working on our historiographic metafictions I feel like I've learned a lot and gotten a lot of unique writing experiences. The worst experience thus far has been getting sick with flu-like symptoms while reading Maia's terrifyingly realistic depiction of the Spanish flu outbreak (complete with gory death scenes!). Although I do admit trying to write an extra scene full of dialogue of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle while I've had a stomach virus hasn't been a walk in the park either. Regardless, I thought it might be fun to share what I've learned about writing in this style and how I can improve in the future.

The first thing I learned was that in creative writing I tend to be a bit too ambitious. For my short story concept I chose a complex twisting drama about the murders of "Jack the Ripper" and a conspiracy involving the press and others to perpetuate the myth for their own benefit. This idea already seems a bit to complex for a "short" story, but I also initially wanted the story to involve the perspectives of 12 different characters who were all equally important and contributed evenly to the tone and message of the piece. I quickly realized that I was setting out to either write a decently sized novel or the world's longest short story. I realized I was too envious of the highly complex and well thought out plots and themes of our books that I sought out to create my own equally intricate attempt. I was eventually able to narrow the perspectives down to 3 but I still have the concepts and character backgrounds to do the larger project if I wanted. Perhaps if I find some free time over the summer I can make a hobby out of it. The point is that I learned early on that ambition is good, but you must keep your goals realistic.

I went fairly deep into some of my research, as my story deals with a lot of historical people and events, much like Libra or Ragtime. It was here that I discovered it is never enough to simply skim the surface in terms of research if you want to truly write a realistic historical portrayal of your time period. For example, at one point in my preliminary research I found that it is widely believed that journalist Tom Bullen was behind the "jack the ripper letters." Once I looked into the sources that the website cited, however I found that they were misquoting their information, it is true that many believed Tom Bullen to be behind the letters, that opinion has been largely discredited after a recent discovery of a confession by Bullen's colleague Fred Best. I would use this info to change a wikipedia article to more truthfully reflect it's cited material.

The last thing I learned about historiographic writing is that little details are everything in terms of setting up your setting and overall tone. I spent a lot of time researching the methods of Victorian constables and the mannerisms of dollymops (cheap Victorian prostitutes) so that I could portray them naturally and not feel that I was artificially manufacturing their dialogue and actions. I write best when I feel I understand everything about the character first, then simply letting them unfold naturally into a situation. If I do it correctly, it is the easiest and most natural way to write, but if I phone it in it can feel samey and unappealing.

I'm very happy to have done this project, as I feel it's really improved my skills as a writer and reader of historiographic and metafictional pieces. It helps that the assignment was also quite fun to do, something that doesn't happen often enough in classic educational learning if you ask me.