Writing on the Wall: Oh, You're My Best Friend

Writing on the Wall: Oh, You’re My Best Friend

                There’s a little game I like to play with myself when I’m reading a book for the first time. It’s called “Spot the Love Interest.” It’s not the most exciting game in the world. There’s no scoring, so the stakes are pretty low, there’s no one to really compete against, and there’s no prize for winning. But I enjoy playing nonetheless, because it’s a game I can win darn near every time. For whatever reason, many writers are not terribly subtle about who their protagonist’s love interests are going to be. First, find all the characters in the story of your protagonist’s preferred gender. Among these characters, their love interest will generally be one of the following: A), the character whom they have known the longest (the phrase “like brother and sister” may be used), B), the one whom they have most recently met (especially in a contrived or quirky situation), or C), the one they hate the most. Factor in external variables such as age, relevance to plot, likelihood of outrageous gestures of affection, and eccentricity of the potential love interest, and you will find your man or woman a good 90% of the time.

                If only it were so easy in real life. The stars rarely align to alert us to our future soulmates like they do in stories. If I had a dollar for every attractive young man I’ve accidentally bumped into who I didn’t end up dating, I wouldn’t be rich, but I could probably go out and buy a book wherein the heroine meets the future love of her life when she accidentally bumps into him in a crowded hallway. One thing that separates fiction from reality is that it’s often convenient. Love interests are clearly delineated from the rest of the population so that we, as a reader, can follow the story more precisely and with less confusion. Since I enjoy beating a dead metaphor, it’s like labeling all the little bottles on your spice rack—it makes it easier to follow along with the recipe. The problem that arises—and the reason I play my little game—is that an awful lot of writers tend to rely so heavily on the labels and signs that they use them as a substitute for actual chemistry between the characters. Authors stick in a cardboard cutout of a love interest, and expect it to perform the same as a real character without having to put in the effort of developing one. At the heart of this, so to speak, is that characters need to interact a lot to have the chemistry necessary for a believable romance, and they need to be friends.

                Friendships can look like a tricky thing to pull off in writing. After all, there are as many ways of being friends as there are of simply being. Some friends are united by shared hobbies and pastimes; some friends like each other because they’re so different and can learn things from each other. Some people talk to each other incessantly, sharing every facet of their existence and several outside it, while some people just kind of enjoy sitting around and having each other’s company, without words. But no matter how they’re friends, in order for the friendship to be believable, they need to use at least one of the options—AKA, the classic writing maxim “Show, don’t tell.” We should see friends actually being friends. This can actually be reasonably difficult, depending on the type of story being told. While a slow, slice-of-life kind of story can revolve around these moments, a more action-oriented story has issues like pacing to worry about. If you take time out from the story to show two characters just palling around and doing irrelevant things, you run the risk of grinding the story to a halt, and padding it out with things that ultimately aren’t plot-relevant. But if the characters just rush ahead through everything and don’t take the time to talk, the lack of on-screen interaction between them makes it difficult to feel the reality of their relationship.

                The latter is the problem generally faced by the cardboard cut-out love interest. Because they often appear in non-romance-genre stories, the story can’t afford to spend all its time building their relationship. It needs to budget its page space, and it will understandably skew towards things which are important to the type of story being told—a fantasy adventure will spend most of its time on magic and adventuring, while a mystery novel will spend its time digging up clues and pursuing suspects. Romantic development is usually left to the story’s allocated quiet moments, like other types of character development. (After all, that’s what romance really is. A type of character development.) If it isn’t, however, it tends to get shoehorned into more action-oriented or fast-paced scenes, and there it often gets lost. While the characters may be interacting, their interactions get lost in a haze of other activity, and their attentions are often focused elsewhere, on what’s happening in-scene, rather than each other. Plus, the speed of things happening around them means they don’t have time for the sort of in-depth conversation that might say deep things about their characters. Conversation in more intense scenes is generally shallow and curt. If it isn’t, it risks distraction from the action and important things at hand. If a story is too fast-paced, or budgets its pacing poorly, then all the character interactions will get swept away like this.

                Whether building friendships or romances (which really ought to be viewed in the same light), it is possible to interweave action-y moments and slow ones without destroying the pacing. For example, if a story involves lots of traveling (such as in an adventure story), there’s plenty of time for people to talk on the road. It also makes for good transitional scenes! Stories that are naturally going to involve a lot of talking, such as mystery stories or police procedurals where suspects have to be interviewed and evidence has to be gone over, have opportunities for characters to ramble and go off-topic while they wander off into what’s really on their mind. Even settings themselves can be taken advantage of—a school drama can have characters slip off to talk to each other between classes, while a business setting can have people chatting while on break or while working together in the business’s equivalent of a backroom. All of these things can be taken advantage of, though it seems as if they’re often forgotten. I think some authors might be inclined to avoid them, because they want to get their points out in bigger, more meaningful conversations and thus save them for bigger pauses in the action. But small things can say a lot, too.

                In fact, I think it’s really the small moments that makes a relationship believable. Friends have ways of talking to each other. They understand each other, they misunderstand each other, they display their concern and caring in subtle ways, they have their in-jokes and private code, and they generally have a different state of existing around each other than they do with other people. Two people can talk about how devoted they are to each other, or how long they’ve been friends, but what will really make it come across is that moment when, say, Alice gives up going to the karaoke bar so as not to tempt recovering alcoholic Bob, or preteen Charlie gives up his allowance to buy Daisy a five-month-late birthday present. Allowing characters to have those small moments is part of the process of showing them becoming better friends. For example, if two characters are destined for friendship, and one character likes X thing and one character is indifferent to it or hates it, one easy moment would be to show the indifferent or hateful character giving X a chance—whether X be skydiving, knitting, peace, or even green eggs and ham. If two characters have had a businesslike or purely professional relationship, let them chat for a little bit and discover that they have something in common. We come by our friends in lots of different ways, but rarely do we up and say to someone we’ve just met, “OK, you’re going to be my friend now.” It’s a gradual process, and it’s more realistic and believable to convey that process.

                This is why one of the three possible love interests I mentioned earlier is so popular: The “person of their preferred gender they’ve known the longest” option. The friendship is already there. The two already know each other well enough that the long period of buildup and getting to know each other is done. The writer gets to focus on the sexual tension, and, if done with some thoughtfulness, the friction caused by trying to take a previously platonic relationship in a more romantic direction can provide some good conflict. Of course, the key phrase there is “with some thoughtfulness,” and I often feel that writers have a tendency to muck this one up, too. For one thing, they often do ignore the friction. Although friendship is a keystone in both platonic relationships and romantic ones, a romantic relationship requires a different kind of friendship, with a different way of talking about its problems, different devotion and support, and different expectations. The transition is not an easy one, and it does often fail. Fiction, however, often makes the switchover a bit too easy, with both parties often admitting they’ve loved each other for a long time, and finally getting their kiss, with little to-do. If ever one side turns the other down, it rarely sticks (unless there’s another available love interest), and they do come around to each other eventually. With the ease with which these previously non-romantic relationships change, and how infrequently they stay nonromantic, I feel it kind of cheapens platonic relationships in fiction. It makes it seem like there’s no value in having close friends of the opposite sex (or same sex, as the case may be), because what benefits they provided as friends are all rendered moot by the two eventually falling in love.

                This strikes me as one of the greatest shames to come out of our addiction to love interests: A lot of great, and potentially very interesting, platonic character relationships have been struck down in their nascent stage to become love interests, without having being allowed to develop as friends. I can count the number of times I’ve seen wholly platonic male/female relationships, where neither half of the pairing has their own, on-the-side love interest, on one hand. This is not an exaggeration. This is especially troubling given that people who are genuinely just friends, and people who have a potential attraction to one another, tend to act towards each other in very different ways. And a lot of these zigzagged relationships begin wholly in the first territory. I know of one series (again, unnamed for the sake of spoilers) wherein one character had two love interests. His relationship with the first one was the sort of sweet romantic thing you expect of a proper love interest. They were awkwardly sweet towards each other. They doted on one another. They fretted about each other, and they rushed into a few things the way hotheaded and anxious kids very realistically do. With the second one, they didn’t really have anything in common; they had sort of similar hobbies, but their personalities were very different, and the circumstances under which they met did not endear him to her. They did have a great quirky interplay that made them fun to see together on the page, but it wasn’t what you’d call a solid foundation for a relationship. However, the second interest was the one he eventually ended up with, and not long after his rather painful breakup with Love Interest #1, they were doing the funky chicken and being unrealistically schmoopy with abandon. This really irritated me when I first read it. I had really liked Love Interest #2 when she’d been introduced, and I’d been gunning for the character in question to become the loopy platonic friend to compliment his sweet girlfriend; kind of a Luna Lovegood to her Ginny Weasley. But not only did their not-really-romantic banter get shoehorned into being “true love,” the turnaround from one relationship to the other was so fast my neck still hasn’t recovered.

                The urge to write about love is one I understand. It’s part of our lives, and it’s one of the few things that brings us both sorrow and pleasure in such great amounts. It’s drama, comedy, and everything in-between. It’s great writing material. But it’s also complicated, as Facebook’s “Relationship Status” field will attest, and a lot of writers don’t seem to be willing to go that extra mile to fully portray it and its complexities. I’m not saying happily-ever-after love stories don’t have their place. More that, in order to be believable, they should go into detail about the couple’s interactions, and be sure to show us the way that the couple gets along, and how they behave around each other, and just generally what really makes them True Loves. And I do encourage more writers to write male-female platonic relationships. (Or male-male/female-female, because goodness knows, being gay does not exempt you from these clichés.) Just like in real life, there’s a lot to be gained from having good friends of your sexually-preferred gender. You can gain a different perspective on life from their experiences as the opposite gender, if that applies. There are things that it might be awkward to ask a love interest that you can learn about from your friends, and they might be able to give you insight. They give the tomboy someone to connect to over her love of video games, the artsy guy someone to knit with, and, heck, maybe even that gay guy needs someone who knows that football is more than just muscular men. (Obviously, these examples only use stereotypical roles.) Above all, I think it’s important to remind ourselves that just because we enjoy someone’s company doesn’t mean you want to drag them back to your cave by their hair.

                I admittedly am a biased person, as I am a straight female whose friends are overwhelmingly male (straight, gay, and bi alike). But my interactions with my own friends have taught me well enough that writers tend to oversimplify more than they should. So as a collective, writerly whole, we should try to write friendships better than we do. We’ll write better love interests. We’ll write better character development. We’ll write better stories overall. And who doesn’t want that?