It's the story of Dwayne Hoover, a used car dealer in the Midwest, who crosses paths with Kilgore Trout, an eccentric science fiction writer. Vonnegut's writing style is breezy. He put his own little drawings throughout the book. The story itself was a page turner. I loved it. It reminded me of the town where I grew up, but years before I was born.
Here's what kept running through my mind as I was reading the book: Write what you know.
This is how Vonnegut describes Kilgore Trout:
I gave him the same legs the Creator of the Universe gave to my father when my father was a pitiful old man. They were pale white broomsticks. They were hairless. They were embossed fantastically with varicose veins.
Isn't that a powerful description? That paragraph made me stop reading, and I just sat there for a few minutes to take in that picture. He wrote what he knew. Kilgore Trout got the real-life legs of Vonnegut's father.
Vonnegut wrote the novel in 1973, and he hammered home themes about racism and environmental destruction and consumerism and other social issues of the 1970s that he clearly had strong feelings about. He wrote what he knew. And that made me think about the two John Steinbeck novels I've read: Grapes of Wrath and In Dubious Battle, both from the 1930s. Both novels are sympathetic to the plight of farm laborers, which Steinbeck clearly had strong opinions about. He wrote what he knew, too.
I gave him the same legs the Creator of the Universe gave to my father when my father was a pitiful old man. They were pale white broomsticks. They were hairless. They were embossed fantastically with varicose veins.
Isn't that a powerful description? That paragraph made me stop reading, and I just sat there for a few minutes to take in that picture. He wrote what he knew. Kilgore Trout got the real-life legs of Vonnegut's father.
Vonnegut wrote the novel in 1973, and he hammered home themes about racism and environmental destruction and consumerism and other social issues of the 1970s that he clearly had strong feelings about. He wrote what he knew. And that made me think about the two John Steinbeck novels I've read: Grapes of Wrath and In Dubious Battle, both from the 1930s. Both novels are sympathetic to the plight of farm laborers, which Steinbeck clearly had strong opinions about. He wrote what he knew, too.
So that's the cue I'm taking from Breakfast of Champions. I think there's a novel in my head ... maybe. I just haven't been able to get it out yet. And if I'm ever going to write a piece of fiction, I've got to do some thinking about what I know. I've got to start thinking about those life moments that can be translated into something bigger, and I've got to start thinking about what early 21st Century causes, ideas, issues that I could hang a novel of my own on.
As for actually ever being disciplined enough to actually sit down and write a novel - that's another story. I've started writing fiction before. I'll write a chapter here, and a piece of dialogue there -- but I don't have any finished stories to show for it. But this blog has been good for me because I've gotten into the habit of writing something (most) every day. (Except this week. Oops.)
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