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[Stroggy]

Originally posted by Playbahnosh@Jun 9 2005, 10:07 AM
WOW!

Sebatianos, Stroggy --- CONGRATULATIONS! k:

I didn't thought there are succesful authors here with award winning and actually published novells...* :blink:

I wouldn't call myself award-winning.

Oh, another reason I wasn't satisfied with my book was because I wrote it in Dutch. Dutch is an okay language but I still find languages like French and English (and even German) much more handy as they have some words that carry more... weight. It is difficult to explain. Regular dutch can be a very dry language and that is often a problem in many dutch books. In English books even a very simple character can gain some depth from the words he uses to explain himself, Dutch doesn't have this, the characters seems sterile and the author must make an extra effort to sculp his character.

I recently had to read a book for Dutch Literature called "De Avonden" ("The Nights") it's basically about a young man after the second world war, he lives in the Netherlands together with his mom and dad and he is bored and depressed. At night he searches for things to do and he contacts some old friends (who he hardly knows) and so the book inches forward with little to no plot.
Such a book needs a good structure and interesting characters to be interesting, however it fails at delivering convincing or dynamic characters, all of them seem to be cardboard copies of eachother, the only character with some depth is the main character.

Come to think of it there are very few Dutch books (that don't use dialect language) that actually have realistic characters in them.

I think the hardest part is finishing chapter one.

An all too familiar problem, I know how my story basically begins and ends, but the actual first chapter and the chapters between the beginning and the middle are proving to be quite difficult since you must combine two things: plot continuation and character build-up. It is in the first quarter of the book that you can make or break a character.