Barnacles

File this one in your "Where and  how do you come up with your characters?" file.

Sooner or later, if you write and publish fiction, you're gonna have someone ask you this question.

I've answered this one many, many times, but for the purposes of this blog post, I'm going to focus on the most recent time I answered it. And I did so by talking about "barnacles."

Of course I'm not talking about the actual crustaceans found accreted to the hulls of ships. "Barnacles" in this instance is a metaphorical reference to a particular type of person everyone encounters over the course of their lives: unwanted (or at least unsought-after) connections with people they have no interest in connecting with.

Think Spike and Chester from Warner Brothers cartoons.

The prototypical symbiotic relationship.

Or Jim and Michael from The Office.

Or, for that matter, Michael and Dwight from The Office.

For most of us, barnacles come and go. Our personal barnacles attach themselves to our hulls as the result of a work relationship. It's often a case of changing jobs giving our metaphorical hulls a good, hard scraping.

Recently my wife and I were talking about a couple of my own latest work barnacles, and how each of them could make a great fictional character in one of my stories, whether protagonist, antagonist, or "plucky comic relief." My wife, in so many ways the most perceptive of women, pointed out something I had never given much thought to-something I think I always understood at a core level, just never really articulated it before.

In a phrase: the best fiction tells relatable stories about the human condition.

And since a "barnacle" is something everyone experiences at one time or another, what could be morevrelaqtable than writing about that experience?

After all, the world is full of barnacles. Everyone reading this can relate to this experience: the coworker who gets super graphic about his (nearly always his) dates. The neighbor who thinks you're as concerned as they are about a certain given "bad element" (Like, I don't know? Shriners?) moving into the neighborhood. The friend-of-a-friend you always seem to see at social events who thinks you two have bonded over some tenuously shared experience ("You were in the Navy? My brother was in the Navy!"), and defines you thusly ("My squid buddy! Glad you could make it, man! Let's talk patrol boats!").

What's more, everyone who reads this is also likely to have been (or is currently serving as) a barnacle in some else's life. Yep, in one way or another, we're all barnacles to some degree.

And it got me thinking: I have based characters on friends. I have based them on folks I may have met only once, with the interaction for some reason or another being incredibly memorable. I have based them on people I despised (or even still despise, present tense).

But–and I know that I might well be late to the party on this, because there are a lot of writers out there who are a hell of a lot more on the ball than I am!–I have never really based a character on someone who persistently annoyed me, day in, day out.

And I think it's high time I did.

On second thought, maybe instead of filing this one under "Where and how do you come up with your characters?", we ought to file it under "Writing Truths that are self-evident to most intelligent life in the Universe, but about which Brian is, as usual, Late to the Party"?

How about you? Any "barnacles" in your experience who may have provided fodder for your fiction? Please drop a line and share about them in the Comments section.

And as always-

See you in two weeks!