WILLIE ORR
WRITER OF HISTORICAL NOVELS, SHORT STORIES, PLAYS AND RADIO PLAYS
I write historical novels, partly because I studied history at university but largely because I’m fascinated by how people lived in the past. I try to bring the past to life in my characters and descriptions of their countries. Historical novels are not history. History provides the stage and the scenery in which, like actors, fictional people live, love and die – people like Catherine in ’SHIABA’ and Mick in ‘MICK’
As writers of historical novels, we can’t distort or erase historical facts. Our research must be thorough and presentation accurate. I learnt about research in university, trawling through old, dusty documents and letters which were barely legible and finding that twenty or thirty pages of notes produced only a paragraph in a book. Writing history requires discipline, dedication and integrity. I published ‘DEER FORESTS, LANDLORDS AND CROFTERS.’
Yet I longed for the freedom of creative writing where I could create characters and so I studied Creative Writing with the Open University. From that came many short stories with Harper Collins and other collections. I have listed these on the site along with my biography ‘THE SHEPHERD AND THE MORNING STAR’, where my chequered career is revealed – a shipyard worker, an actor, a forestry worker, a shepherd and finally a teacher and counsellor.