David Alastair Hayden

Here’s an excerpt of an inter­view I did for Dark­cargo. Go check it out!

A com­mon argument–complaint, maybe–that I over­hear is that there’s noth­ing new to fan­tasy, every­thing is either a re-hash of Tolkein or para­nor­mal romance. How would you con­test that?

As far as basic story struc­ture goes, noth­ing is new. I’ve stud­ied a lot of mythol­ogy and sto­ry­telling and… I don’t want to bore your read­ers. Suf­fice to say: Every­thing is new; noth­ing is new. Orig­i­nal­ity is over­rated. I think sci-fi and fan­tasy fans tend to worry about this a lot more than most read­ers. I mean, there’s noth­ing new in thrillers or mys­tery or romance either, so why should fan­tasy be any dif­fer­ent?
On the other hand, the details and specifics of every story are dif­fer­ent and fre­quently highly orig­i­nal. Every author mixes the basics dif­fer­ently and brings new things to the table because every writer is intrin­si­cally dif­fer­ent.
And I have yet to see as many Tolkien clones as some read­ers like to claim. I have only seen two or three close copies, and even those didn’t have the same tex­ture as LotR.

And for the record, a read­ing of North­ern Euro­pean mythol­ogy will dull one’s view of Tolkien’s orig­i­nal­ity. Not say­ing he didn’t cre­ate a lot or orig­i­nal mate­r­ial, but he also bor­rowed a good bit himself.