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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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New Friends vs Old Friends
Last week we made the case that best friend love is a story engine. It comes with three ingredients, an arc, and hands you a bond that doubles as your plot.
Best friend stories are not one thing. A story about two women who have known each other since high school (Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion) is doing something structurally different from a story about two strangers who get handcuffed together in act one (The Defiant Ones.) Both are best friend love but need different tools.
If you write an old friends story with new friends techniques and you’ll spend forty pages introducing people who are supposed to already know each other. Write a new friends story with old friends techniques and you’ll have two strangers finishing each other’s sentences by page ten.
This week we’re breaking down the difference between old and new friendships and how to write them.
New Friends: Strangers Who Become Everything
Some best friend stories begin with two people who have never met. Project Hail Mary is an extreme version because they’re not from the same solar system. Sometimes they start as antagonists. In Midnight Run, a bounty hunter and his prisoner spend a cross country trip loathing each other into loyalty. Other times they know each other but aren’t friends yet. To win his girlfriend’s brother’s approval, a wannabe cop must survive a 24-hour ride along designed to humiliate him in Ride Along.
How to Build a New Friendship
The challenge is the same in all of them. You have to make an audience believe in a bond that didn’t exist when the story started, so the ending hits hard. If you’re building a friendship from zero, you have two power tools.
1. Establish trust through shared action. Put them in a situation where one of them has to trust the other. The risk is big, and the payoff is bigger. Somebody has the other’s back when it costs them. The big one is one of the duo saves the other’s life.
In Project Hail Mary when the ship starts spinning out of control, Grace is knocked unconscious. Rocky, who cannot survive in human atmosphere, breaks out of his protective capsule to save him, nearly dying himself. It’s one of the most powerful scenes in the movie. It is a deposit into an emotional bank account that the ending is going to cash.
2. Use intense experiences. Shared intense experiences quickly build a deep, believable relationship between two people who have nothing else in common. This is why so many friendships form in foxholes, hospitals, and terrible jobs. If your two characters don’t like each other, put them in a horrible situation.
Inside Jokes
Once they’ve bonded, show it with inside jokes and their own lingo. In Project Hail Mary, as Rocky and Grace learn to communicate, this happens naturally. It’s one of the most charming parts of their friendship.
“Fist my bump.” Grace teaches Rocky the fist bump through the wall. Rocky mangles the word order. Grace corrects him, Rocky insists it’s the same, and Grace loses that argument permanently. By the end it’s their gesture at every major beat, error and all.
"Question?” — Rocky’s translated speech marks a question by sticking the word on the end. He occasionally does the same with “statement” at the end of a declarative, though inconsistently, and seemingly for emphasis. Grace picks the habit up and starts using it himself.
“Friend” as a title. Rocky puts it in front of the name rather than using it as a noun, and Grace starts doing it back. Their goodbye is built entirely on that construction.
Notice that the lingo is never one-directional. Grace doesn’t teach Rocky English and Rocky doesn’t teach Grace Eridian — they meet in a dialect that only the two of them speak, complete with a permanent grammatical error.
Here’s how to build running jokes and lingo:
- Name it. Something happens (a mistake, something silly, a genuinely stupid moment) and one of them names it.
- Repeat it. It comes back somewhere ordinary, and now it’s shorthand.
- Pay it off. It returns at an emotional peak, where it means something completely different then it did the first time.
Old Friends: The McDonald’s Pickle Principle
Your characters have been friends for twenty years and your reader met them four minutes ago. How do you make us feel two decades of history without a flashback montage and eight paragraphs of backstory?
You show us with things like inside jokes, a shared look, or a fifteen year running argument.
Ride or Die uses McDonald’s pickles to show history and affection. After the first shootout, the two friends sit in the car eating McDonald’s and swap their pickles without a word. One tiny food preference that one friend knows about the other, deployed at exactly the right moment, and suddenly you believe in twenty years of shared history you never saw.
You don’t need the montage. You need the pickles.
Old friends refer to the past in their own kind of shorthand. In Broadcast News, Aaron says to Jane “Ok, I’ll meet you at the place near the thing where we went that time.” She knows exactly what he’s talking about. In Sahara, Dirk suggests they need to pull a Panama, and Al comes back appalled. A Panama? A Panama? Later Dirk shuts the idea down himself with “No Panama!” The audience never finds out what a Panama is. No flashback or explanation needed.
Friendship Tests
Sometimes the characters start as longtime friends and the story tests them (21 Jump Street, Shaun of the Dead.) The friendship gets strained, cracks, and comes out stronger.
The tests can be:
- An outsider arrives and one friend chooses them — a girlfriend, a new crowd, a promotion.
- A secret surfaces and one of them turns out not to be who the other thought.
- They grow at different speeds, which is the quietest and cruelest one, because nobody did anything wrong.
The most juicy stories make the friendship glue the wedge. Whatever bonds these two is be the thing that tears them apart. 21 Jump Street builds Schmidt and Jenko’s friendship is built on complementary deficiency — one has the brains, one has the social ease, and together they’re a whole person. They go undercover in high school the hierarchy flips, and they must adjust to this new dynamic.
Whether the friends in your story are new friends or old friends, there are all kinds of emotional dilemmas to mine to make a great story!
Next week, we're looking at the difference between women's and men's friendships and how to write them.
