Rhys Oram

‘Characters are the life of the story.’

‘If you don’t believe in what you’re writing, then how is the reader going to?’

‘I’m an addict. I can’t stop writing.’

R.G. Oram has never stopped writing. In school, he and the rest of his English class were given an assignment to write a five page short story. He ended up writing over twenty pages. When his teacher read the story he’d written, she told him it was very good and he shouldn’t stop.

Having spent three years on his first novel, Much Needed Rain, while working, studying, helping his family and undergoing surgery on both his knees which gave him the ability to run again, he now wants to try his hand at fiction.

Born in Swansea, Wales. But lived most of his life in Carmarthenshire. Whenever he could he’d visit the USA. A country he loves for its vast and varying landscape, its devoted patriotism and its cultural love for storytelling. If you asked him who his favourite writer is he’d say, “I don’t have one. The only thing that matters to me is I’ve read and enjoyed someone’s book and I know I’ll buy more of their works again.”

He first got hooked onto storytelling when his childhood friend one day brought over a video of a wrestling promotion. Within the square ring, performers either hit each other with steel chairs or jumped off ladders onto the canvas. And the rest was history.

“It wasn’t the body slams or the choreographed one liners which caught my attention that day, it was how there was always two forces opposing each other in the ring. One would represent the side of good and the other, just your typical bad guy. The basic format of that story was repeated over and over, yet there was always something different conjured in each script or segment. It was the wrestlers/characters who shaped the experience. Even if anybody who’s watched professional wrestling/sports entertainment knows it’s surreal, except it is real to whoever sees the story moving and is so captivated by it, that reality disappears and imagination flourishes. It’s not about what’s real, it’s about how well the story is told.

“And seeing all that made me want to create my own stories, draw my own characters.”