How to write fictional friendships
BY Anna Davis
23rd Jan 2024
Friendship is a powerful force in fiction – and its potential to help writers bring protagonists fully to life on the page – and indeed to be a driver of story, is often underestimated. Lots of novels feature loners with no friends or even acquaintances, but most of us do have someone we check in with from time to time, however glancingly. And I’d suggest that if you choose to write about a character who’s completely isolated from others for no very tangible reason, you may be missing out on opportunities to enrich your story.
Two questions you might usefully ask yourself, when starting a novel and getting to know your protagonist, are:
- What role does friendship play in my character’s life?
- What role do my character’s friends play in my story?
Is your character a social butterfly who surrounds themselves with people but only relates to them on a peripheral level? Does your protagonist have just one or two integral friends with whom they share their highs and lows? Is your character embroiled in a toxic friendship rife with jealousy and betrayal? Here are some of the ways in which your character’s friendships can help you move your story forward:
- The confidante: If your character tells their secrets to one friend, this can help you to communicate important information to the reader. And if the friend is not trustworthy, this provides a means for secrets to leak out and cause trouble for your character.
- Conveying backstory: If your character is getting to know a new friend, that’ll give you a reason for them to talk about their personal stories and experiences – which also lets you share them with the reader.
- A proxy for the reader: If your central character is behaving badly or oddly, you can use their friend to voice all the questions and concerns that the reader has, putting your protagonist usefully on the spot. The best friend becomes a proxy for the reader in this dynamic.
- Friendship = character = story: Think about how your character goes about choosing who to be friends with and why. What does your character get from this friendship, and what role do they play in it? What are they, potentially, acting out through this relationship? The answers to these questions could show a lot about your protagonist.
And here are a couple of cautionary notes about writing your protagonist’s friendships:
- Don’t let friendship get in the way – I’ve been talking about the usefulness of fictional friendships, but sometimes they can take you down unhelpful side alleys. If that happens, rein it back.
- Too many friends? – If your protagonist has a wide social circle, don’t give equal time and attention to all. Focus on just one or two and keep others in the background so they don’t clutter up your story. Remember, the reader is only interested in those characters who have a real role to play in the narrative.
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