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The Pitch Master Newsletter
Weekly craft and career fuel for screenwriters and novelists with creativity tips and storytelling tools
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Two of the biggest things streaming on Prime Video right now are love stories. Neither one has a kiss in it. Best friends are one of our life's central relationships. Stories showcasing best friendships are automatically emotional and high stakes.
Project Hail Mary (2026) is about a middle school science teacher who wakes up alone eleven light-years from Earth, has to save the sun, and ends up doing it with a rock-shaped alien spider he nicknames Rocky. They become the best friends either of them has ever had.
Ride or Die (2026) is about Debbie, a London political wife who writes her husband’s speeches and hosts a book club, and who discovers that Judith, her best friend of decades, is an international assassin.
One story builds a friendship from absolute scratch. The other detonates a twenty-year friendship in episode one and spends eight episodes putting it back together.
(Spoilers ahead! If you haven't seen Project Hail Mary or Ride or Die, watch the movie and a couple of episodes before you read the rest of the article. You'll have a great time!)
Let's break down the different ways to use best friendships.
What Is Best Friend Love?
Blake Snyder, in Save the Cat!, calls best friend stories Buddy Love. Snyder says a best friends story needs three things:
1. An incomplete hero. Somebody who is missing something — physical, ethical, or spiritual. There is a hole in this person. They cannot fill it alone, and, crucially, they usually don’t know that yet. They think they’re fine. They are not fine.
2. A counterpart. The other one. The person who has the thing your hero is missing, or who makes the completion happen just by existing in the same room. Not a mirror. A missing puzzle piece.
3. A complication. Something that gets in the way. A misunderstanding. A clash of ethics. A war. A secret. A society that disapproves. An Albanian crime syndicate. Whatever keeps these two from simply hugging it out in act one.
In Project Hail Mary, Ryland Grace didn't volunteer for the one way mission. That’s his hole: he doesn’t believe he’s the kind of person who shows up. Rocky has total, uncomplicated certainty. The complication is physical. They cannot breathe the same air. They cannot touch. They are separated by a wall for the entire relationship.
In Ride or Die. Debbie is a woman who has poured every ounce of her formidable competence into a husband who can’t tie his own shoes. She’s missing a life of her own. Judith is the counterpart — a woman who has never known love outside this one friendship, and who has an entire skill set Debbie has never dreamed of. The complication is the twenty-year lie.
Three ingredients. Two wildly different stories.
The Odd Couple Engine
Most buddy stories run on the odd couple dynamic. Two people whose personalities or professions grind against each other like mismatched gears, and that grinding fuels your plot.
Neat freak and slob (The Odd Couple). Cop and con man (Midnight Run). Assassin and antique enthusiast. (Ride or Die)
The odd couple isn’t a comedy trick, though it can be funny. It’s a story engine. Every time these two have to solve a problem, they will want to solve it differently. You don’t have to import conflict from outside. It’s already sitting in your car with you, complaining about the radio station.
The mistake writers make is casting the odd couple and then never letting them be odd. If your mismatched pair agrees on everything after page twenty, you’ve unplugged your own engine.
Philia: The Love That Faces Outward
The Greeks had a word for friendship love, philia. The classic way to describe it is that romantic love is face-to-face, while friendship love is shoulder-to-shoulder.
Lovers look at each other. Friends look at the same thing.
Friendships are built on a shared mission or a common enemy. They’re forged pointing in the same direction. The thing that bonds your characters is also your plot.
Grace and Rocky are staring at the same impossible problem. The friendship is the byproduct of the mission, and the mission is what makes the friendship believable.
Best friends stories are built on this idea of brotherhood. From Band of Brothers to The Avengers to Lethal Weapon, best friends share a mission, a cause, and a threat.
Give your friends something to look at. A goal, danger, an enemy. Point them at it and let the bond happen sideways.
Friendship Is the Love You Choose
You don’t pick your family. You sort of stumble into romance. But friends? Friends are chosen. Every single day, on purpose, with no legal paperwork requiring it.That’s the beating heart of every great friendship story.
Why did these two people choose each other?
What do they add to each other’s lives? What does love and support look like in this specific relationship? What keeps them choosing, on the days when it would be easier not to?
Best Friend Intimacy
In best friend stories, two people start out with their defenses fully deployed, and the story is about dropping them. The destination is friends who are more emotionally honest and closer at the end.
Best friend stories have a moment of sacrifice when one or both friends sacrifice for the other. In Project Hail Mary, Grace and Rocky both risk their own lives to save the others at different points in the story. In Ride or Die, Judith kills her partner to prevent the assassin from killing Debbie. Later, Debbie turns herself into Interpol so that Judith can get away.
These sacrifices reveal vulnerability and also strengthen their bond.
Both of Them Have to Change.
If only one of your characters is transformed by the friendship, you haven’t written a friendship. You’ve written a life coach.
They should learn from each other’s skills and perspectives, and both come out different people. Grace learns courage from Rocky. Rocky learns joy from Grace. Debbie learns she is a badass. Judith learns she is capable of being loved.
Two arcs. Two transformations. One relationship.
Give the friendship its own arc.
The bond itself should change, grow, get tested and come back different. The friendship is a character. Put it through the wringer.
Test it with secrets. Test it with conflict. Let it break. Then let them choose it again.
The story should mean something different to each of them. Same events, two different internal journeys. In Ride or Die, Debbie, running across Europe discovers she is a badass. For Judith, it’s about whether she gets to keep the only real thing in her life. Same road trip. Completely different stakes.
As you can see, best friend stories are rich with emotion and stakes. How can you incorporate a best friendship into one of your current projects? Or can you come up with a story where best friends are at the center?
Next week we'll be exploring specific kinds of best friend stories.
