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Write The Unexpected.

© David A Simpson.

How many readers take a book to bed to read before they go to sleep. I would expect a good Science Fiction book to have a totally opposite effect than lulling the reader into the realm of heavy eyelids and sweet dreams. A good fast moving Science Fiction novel should stimulate and create a want and need from the reader to read more, to experience the new world or universe the author has created with all the twists and turns of the unexpected. But unfortunately our new writers who break out into the published world and have the creditable right to call themselves authors are responsible for making more people look at the back of their eyelids for six to eight hours than most politicians speeches or even church ministers delivering a sermon. They have the ability to wean people off sleeping tablets with a book which can never be considered close to addictive but guaranteed to work and should have a health warning for the fact it could have a detrimental effect to your future thinking capacity. I would like to follow this with a list of candidates but these masterpieces had such a memorable effect from reading them I can't remember their titles.

Now why can't writers follow their own inspiration and create a good novel that does not follow the inevitable route which means the reader knows the final outcome but has to read to the end in the vain hope that an author has managed to find an original ending. This also means the reader has to have the discipline not to read the last chapter first!!

There seems to be rules in the writing world written on tablets of stone handed down from generation to generation laying the foundation for writers to build their work on. It is not retarding the new themes or Science Fictions upward and onward advance into new realms but the expected good guy kills bad guy, the hero gets the women and the minority force overcomes the superior forces of the evil oppressor with the help of a laptop or a secretly concealed boy scouts penknife. We know when the lights will fail; the deflector shields are at 20% and a hairpin is needed to repair the nuclear reactor by a schoolboy when all the experts are running for cover the final outcome is the expected.

If you are going to write and intend to be published try and take your readers into your new dimension with the intention of keeping them awake or at least stimulating some exciting dreams in their nocturnal shutdown. Stimulate their imagination by using your own creative and new themes not the old and obvious. If though you find you have to follow the rules of the tablets of stone at some point then at least manipulate them as our hero in "No Second Chance" does with devastating effect when he states, "All ways expect the unexpected because the unexpected is only the expected when you least expect it."

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