zeekie: take two.

So. I've only finished one day at Tor, but already I've ruined at least 19 people's dreams. And in some of those people's cases, their very, very, very wordy dreams. We're talking about upwards of 100,000 words here.

I've ruined those people's dreams because slush-pile sorting is a large component of what I do there. Don't get me wrong; I love this part of the internship, and it's a major reason why I applied for it in the first place. I love reading through all the piles of envelopes; I like seeing the ideas that people have; and I do love being able, sometimes, to shelve an envelope for further consideration. But the part of the slush-pile that involves sending out form rejection letters? That part is the part that I don't relish all that much.

It isn't just the sense of foreboding that I get when I have to send those envelopes; it's also because in most of those cases the writers aren't eye-rendingly bad. It's just that either the stories are really not anything to get excited about, or the writing itself just fails to get me turning the pages of their manuscripts. Now, I'm fully aware that I am only one person, and that taste is really subjective, but they're free to resend their manuscripts every fall, winter, spring and summer semester if they'd like, and I'm assuming that they've either done this or will quickly learn to do so, so I'm not going to stress myself about whether I'm accurately reflecting the nation's taste, or whatever. I will say that I think I'm a fairly broadminded person: the books on my shelves go from Sophie Kinsella to Kazuo Ishiguro. It isn't, really, that hard to get me excited.

But the vast majority of what I read seems to have been xeroxed from each other. I counted four amnesiac heroes in the space of 20 submissions alone; ten of those twenty had storylines that mirrored each other for all intents and purposes.

Now. Regarding the amnesiac heroes (brothers?): reusing a trope by itself isn't a bad thing in my (or a) book. God knows J. K. Rowling's series is practically a trope pastiche. But when you reuse a trope and are lazy in general into the bargain, the trope becomes the mercy-killing point that makes me put down your manuscript.

What do I mean? I mean when a person empties dwarves and elves and mountains and magic swords and dragons willy-nilly into a summary, the flatness of the manuscript becomes very apparent very quickly. You can't replace strong characters and strong character arcs with exotically-named creatures, and expect such wanton detail to impress anyone at all. A great character is great whether you call him Bill or Sileuxenatra (a name, most unfortunately, not made up by me). A bad character is a bad character even if you name him Sileuxenatra.

And that is the problem that most of the manuscripts have - and why they mirror each other for all intents and purposes. They're not stories about characters. They're Fantasy Geographic articles about locations and cool-sounding artifacts. The characters are just vehicles to get from Ixtrecifrsda the elven stronghold to M'luudela the infamous goblin wand. And the 'hmmm, cool' factor of such trinkets has a very short half-life. Especially when 19 other people are doing the exact same thing.

I was talking with my brother last night about the setting of a story versus its emotional core. I don't think anyone will say that the setting is not important, but I think it's the emotional core that makes or breaks a story. And realistically that core is usually in the form of a person. Characters carry books; settings are their clothes. I really hope that more of the never-ending slush pile are filled with characters, and less are filled with shiny but ultimately irritating trinkets.