The Three Cline Children Live On

Today I’m writing for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group’s blog hop. The first Wednesday of each month, we write in inspiration to a question posed by the group’s administrators. We don’t need to write in response to the question posed, but I like to use their query as the springboard for the monthly post.

This month the OPTIONAL IWSG Day Question is: What personal traits have you written into your character(s)?

The awesome co-hosts for the July 3 posting of the IWSG are Erika Beebe, Natalie Aguirre, Jennifer Lane, MJ Fifield, Lisa Buie-Collard, and Ellen @ The Cynical Sailor!

The Three Cline Children Live On

Oh, so often my characters end up with my own personal traits. After all, one of the common pieces of advice is ‘to write what we know.’ And what do we know better than our own personal traits – be they flawed, noble, or inaccurately perceived.

The three Cline children – I and my younger brother and sister – from our younger years have come to my aid on my newest work in progress. I want to write a series of three books about a set of 1934 quilt squares that were stitched by real people over eighty years ago – a chapter book, a middle-grade book, and a novel for adults. I initially planned to have one of the real people as the main character in the books. But, knowing there would be descendants of this real person, I didn’t want to write the book from their point of view and then discover that I’d grossly misjudged their character or what they were like in their younger years.

Since the tales will be told in a fictional manner, I created a family that is going to move to town. I needed two younger girls for the chapter book and middle-grade book, and a mother for the adult novel. Let’s put a boy right in the middle of the two girls and voila! There’s my family. The oldest daughter (me) is Faith, my middle name. A brother two years younger is played by Edward, my brother’s middle name. And the littlest sister is played by Elizabeth, my sister’s middle name.

Naturally, Faith, the oldest is a bit of a nerdy book worm. She’s more interested in books and crafts – mostly books. Edward is curious and active and loves to pester his two sisters. And Elizabeth has those huge, brown eyes that she bats furiously when she wants to get her way.

These younger Cline siblings may be older now, the two girls now grandmothers and the brother supervising from the heavenly realm. None of the three of us were even around in 1934. Our parents weren’t even born until 1934 and 1936. But thanks to the wonderful world of fiction, the three Cline kids will have their own Marty McFly vehicle, but instead of flying to the future, we’re stepping back in time to become characters in a tale from long ago.

You’ve got to love being a writer – the magic we can weave with our words!

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Any other historical fiction authors here? In April I started a weekly newsletter – Pages of the Past – celebrating historical fiction. Each week I have an author spotlight on a historical fiction author, along with a Reading Roundup of 2-3 books from different eras. If you’re an author and are interested in being interviewed for an author spotlight, email me at texastrishafaye@yahoo.com. I’m scheduling authors for August and September. Also, if you have any books you’d like featured, email me and let me know and I’ll get it scheduled into the next newsletter for that era.

If you’d like to take a look to see if you’re interested, here’s a link to the May 31^st newsletter.