I recently came across the following list on Amazon:  “100 Science Fiction and Fantasy Books to Read in a Lifetime.”

As a fantasy writer myself, I decided to spend the next few years reading every book on this list and record the lessons I learned from each volume on how to be a great writer.

If you haven’t read Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five since Sophomore English, I highly recommend checking it out again. It’s much more rewarding when you’re not reading it just so you can write a 3,000 word essay on “such and such.” Not only is it a surreal, hilarious, challenging science-fiction story, it is one of the greatest anti-war novels ever written. It would strike a particular chord with fans of Catch-22 or the film Dr. Strangelove.

And when you’ve finished this book, check out my personal favorite work of Vonnegut fiction, Breakfast of Champions. I should also mention that in 2017 Seven Stories Press released a complete collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s short fiction.

PLOT (from Goodreads): Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time, Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous firebombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim’s odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we fear most.

WHAT I LEARNED: One of the most common observations authors and readers make about the sci-fi genre is that books like 1984 and Brave New World aren’t really about the distant future. They’re about what’s taking place right now. Almost every great work of science-fiction has a foundation firmly planted in the real world.

Slaughterhouse-Five appears to be an extreme example of this. The first chapter is written in the form of an author’s preface. The narrator states that ever since he returned from World War II, he has been trying to write a book on his experiences, particularly the bombing of Dresden. As far as I can tell, this narrator is literally meant to be the novel’s author. Vonnegut was a soldier during the war and survived Dresden. The book even opens with the famous line “All this happened, more or less.”

The novel’s narrator goes on to describe how he had difficulty writing this book and went to great lengths trying to create a cohesive story. The subsequent nine chapters are the book itself, a biting satire that tells the life of Billy Pilgrim, a man who has come “unstuck in time” and moves between random moments, experiencing his birth, his death, the war and his abduction by aliens.

I’ll be honest, I couldn’t verify just how true this first chapter is. I don’t know if Kurt Vonnegut really did try to write a “straight” war story before he wrote a science-fiction novel. However, I do know that Slaughterhouse-Five is considered semi-autobiographical. There are even passages in which one of Billy Pilgrim’s fellow soldiers says or does something and the third person narrator writes, “That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.” All evidence points to the fact that this novel, including the first chapter, at least skirt into the realms of non-fiction.

So what’s the take away? Well, there are millions of people out there struggling to write their own life stories. I’ve personally never attempted such a feat but from what I understand, memoir is one of the toughest genres an author can attempt. Writers often get stuck trying to retell the events of their lives and their work often falls between the cracks of countless other memoirs.

However, as contradictory as this might seem, a memoirist does always have the option of injecting speculative elements into their fiction. I’m not saying you need to give yourself super powers or access to a space ship. You don’t need to make your “non-fiction” as surreal as Vonnegut’s work (and I’m certainly not saying you should try to pass the fantastical elements as fact). However, what if you included two or three chapters in which the narrator interacts with (or imagines themselves interacting with) dead relatives? Or you could have a moment in which the adult narrator has a conversation with a half-forgotten imaginary friend.

Keep in mind, you wouldn’t necessarily have to use these moments in the final product. You could just use these speculative scenes as writing exercises. That being said, using some elements of magical realism could be what your story needs to stand out to readers.

DID I LEARN ANYTHING ELSE?: Despite its subject matter, Slaughterhouse-Five is a very funny book. As I mentioned in my post on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it can be in the author’s best interest to include humor when covering subject matters that aren’t inherently funny (whether it be war or the mysteries of life).

The comedy found in Slaughterhouse and Hitchhiker’s are very different from one another (one is a serious book with funny moments, the other is a funny book that covers serious topics), but both  are fantastic books to read if you want to learn how to inject comedy into your novel.

DISTINCT PASSAGE: This is one of my favorite moments in the book. It appears on pages 13-14 of the 1994 hardcover edition.

This passage appears in the book’s first chapter (mentioned above). In it the narrator is visiting with an old war friend. They are discussing the book he is trying to write. However, the friend’s wife, Mary, is clearly furious with the narrator, although he doesn’t understand why.

“Then she turned to me, let me see how angry she was, and that the anger was for me. She had been talking to herself, so what she said was a fragment of a much larger conversation. ‘You were just babies then!’ she said.

“‘What?’ I said.

“‘You were just babies in the war – like the ones upstairs!’

“I nodded that this was true. We had been foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of childhood.

“‘But you’re not going to write it that way, are you.’ This wasn’t a question. It was an accusation.

“‘I – I don’t know,’ I said.

“‘Well, I know,’ she said. ‘You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra or John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them. And they’ll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.’

“So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn’t want her babies or anybody else’s babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies.

___

“So I held up my right hand and I made her a promise: ‘Mary,’ I said, ‘I don’t think this book of mine is ever going to be finished. I must have written five thousand pages by now, and thrown them all away. If I ever do finish it, though, I give you my word of honor: there won’t be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne.'”