It is Swap Ideas Day! It’s a day for brainstorming with a friend.
Try this exercise: give your logline away and see what comes back.
You hand another writer your logline and nothing else. They write your first ten script pages, or your first chapter. You write theirs. A week later you trade back and read what somebody else did with your story.
Bam! A brand new angle on a story you have been living inside for months.
A notes session tells you what somebody thought of your execution. A swap shows you what your premise looks like another way. Great for jumpstarting your story when you’re stuck.
The Ten Page Swap
1. Trade loglines and nothing else. One sentence each. No pitch, no context, no “so the thing you need to understand is—.” If your partner has to ask a question before they start, your logline is not finished.
2. Follow the boundaries. One week. Ten script pages or one chapter. The constraint forces you to decide a take on the story.
3. Write it your way, not their way. You are not trying to guess what your partner would have done. You are writing the version you would write. The different approach is the point of the exercise.
4. Read all the way through before saying one word. No reactions, no reading over a shoulder, no commentary at the halfway mark. Finish first.
5. No defending. Your version is on the table. Their version is on the table. Neither one is a criticism of the other. You are exploring each other’s premises.
6. Compare with three questions.
• What did they do that I would never have done?
• What did we both do without discussing it?
• What did they find that is better than what I found?
7. Nobody owns anything. This is an exercise, nobody is co-writing anything. For clarity put the rules in an email.
What You Will Find Out
Your defaults. Where you start, how you start, who you start with.
How your premise lands. Anything you both did without discussing is the logline talking.
Where the story wants to start. Two writers, one premise, two different opening pages.
Try It!
Pick one writer and send them your logline today. One sentence, no explanation, plus the seven rules above.
Happy Swap Ideas Day! Go trade something. Go discover something. And let me know how it goes.
P.S. Did you run the swap and now you are staring at two openings with no idea which way to go? Bring both versions to a story coaching session and we will work out which one your story wants. Book a session here.
Check it Out!
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Cristina Yang says to Meredith Grey in Grey’s Anatomy.
People forget that she’s talking about paperwork. Cristina has scheduled a medical procedure. The clinic won’t confirm the appointment without an emergency contact, and she put down Meredith. That’s the origin of the phrase.
It has since been annexed by romantic couples, but it was coined to describe a friendship. Somebody looked at a form asking who should we call if everything goes wrong and wrote down her best friend’s name.
That’s the whole genre in one sentence.
A couple of weeks ago, we broke male friendship stories into buckets — buddy action, bromance, and the drama that sits underneath both. Women’s friendship stories don’t sort that way. They’re organized around something else.
The Engine: Identity and Belonging
Friendships are a central part of women’s culture, and the stories reflect that. They can carry all kinds of situations, dilemmas, and stakes: comedy, grief, ambition, betrayal, and the very specific horror of watching your person get a new person.
But underneath the wildly different plots, the emotional question is the same two-parter: Who am I when I’m with her? And who am I if I lose her?
That’s the engine. Everything else is the vehicle you bolt it into. A road trip, a wedding, an assassination. If those two questions aren’t running underneath, you don’t have a friendship story.
Interrupted vs. Outgrown
In male friendship stories, the friendship gets interrupted. In female friendship stories, the friendship gets outgrown.
In Lethal Weapon, Riggs and Murtaugh get pulled apart by a plot — a villain, a mission, an external force applying pressure from outside. Something happens to them.
Female friendship stories rarely work that way. Instead, they come apart because one of them got something the other didn’t. Their lives are moving at different speeds. A fiancé. A promotion. A baby.
Insecure built four seasons this way. Issa and Molly’s friendship survives boy problems, bad decisions, and terrible advice. What finally breaks it is that their roles reverse. Issa finally has professional momentum; Molly finally has a functional relationship. Neither one knows how to be the friend of a person who is not struggling in the way she used to.
What does one of them have that the other doesn’t? If the answer is nothing, your friendship has no engine.
The Shapes These Stories Come In
With that engine in mind, here are some classic configurations.
What’s the asymmetry, and what does it cost?
The fear of your best friend replacing you — Bridesmaids (2011). The gold standard for platonic jealousy. Annie isn’t losing a friend, she’s losing her person, and the movie treats that with all the devastation of a breakup.
Women breaking out of their shell — Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar (2021). Two Midwestern culotte enthusiasts leave their town for the first time and discover themselves. The friendship is what makes the leap survivable. Neither woman would have gone alone. In these stories one of them is braver than the other
Standing up to the mean girls — Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion (1997). The friendship survives the reunion, the lie, the fight, and the invention of Post-its. The asymmetry here is who cares more about being accepted.
The friendship that outlasts every romance — Sex and the City, was ostensibly about four women looking for love. But actually it was about the four women’s friendship. The romances came and went. The brunch was forever.
Here are three more buckets.
The Friendship Weepie
Last time we talked about the male friendship drama, where the friendship is the whole story and nobody’s joking. Women’s stories have the same category.
Beaches (1988), Steel Magnolias (1989), Now and Then (1995). Decades of friendship compressed into two hours, usually structured around a death, and engineered with clinical precision to wreck you.
What makes these work structurally is they span a long time. Not a weekend, a lifetime. When you follow two women across thirty years, the asymmetry does itself. One marries and one doesn’t. One leaves town and one stays. One gets sick.
The trade-off is that you’re trading intensity for scope. A weekend story can put every beat under a microscope. A lifetime story has to select ruthlessly using five or six scenes that stand in for decades. Each one has to carry an enormous amount of weight.
If you’re writing in this mode, the question to keep asking is: what is the smallest possible scene that could show they’ve changed?
Coming of Age
If the weepie is a lifetime, the coming-of-age story does the opposite. It clamps down on one summer, one season, one narrow window before everything changes.
Mystic Pizza (1988) takes three young women working at a pizza parlor in a Connecticut fishing town during the last summer before they scatter. One is Yale-bound, one wants to marry up and out, one wants to stay put. Three directions, one summer.
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (2005) makes the structure literal. Four friends, four separate summers, one pair of jeans mailed between them. The garment is a device for keeping a friendship on the page while the friends are geographically apart. The pants are a clever solution that you can steal in a hundred non-denim variations.
Notice that the engine hasn’t changed. It’s just accelerated. In the weepie, the divergence takes thirty years. In the coming-of-age story, it takes twelve weeks.
Friendship Goes Wrong: She Wants Your Life
Female friendship stories have an obsession-and-possession subgenre with no male equivalent It’s the same engine, overheating.
Who am I when I’m with her? What if I’d rather be her than know her?
Single White Female (1992) is the one everyone knows. A roommate moves in and slowly takes over her friend’s life, starting with the haircut. It’s so embedded in the vernacular that the title became a verb — people describe a woman copying them as Single White Female-ing them.
All About Eve (1950) is the ancestor of the entire subgenre. Eve Harrington presents herself as actress Margo Channing’s most devoted fan, becomes her assistant, then her understudy, then her replacement. Eve is a terrifying master manipulator.
Poison Ivy (1992) shifts the target. Sylvie invites Ivy into the family mansion, and Ivy doesn’t leave. What follows is a takeover — Ivy charms Sylvie’s dying mother, wins over the dog, and seduces Sylvie’s father. She isn’t after Sylvie’s friendship. She’s after Sylvie’s family.
The friendship has to be real. If your obsessive character is simply running a con from page one, you don’t have a friendship story. The affection was real, and losing it is a real loss, even when the person was destroying you. If you can get that into your version, you’ve got something better than a thriller.
The Vehicle Is Negotiable. The Engine Isn’t.
Look at the range of stories. Comedy, tragedy, thriller. They’re all running the same two questions. Who am I when I’m with her? And who am I if I lose her?You can put two women anywhere — a spaceship, a bottling plant, a Madrid apartment — as long as the engine is bolted in underneath.
If the friendship in your work in progress feels inert, don’t reach for a bigger plot. Ask what one of them has that the other doesn’t. Ask when she got it. Ask what it costs them both to keep choosing each other anyway.
And then find your version of the emergency contact form — the small, unglamorous, paperwork-shaped moment where one of them writes down the other’s name.
Ever wonder what it’s like to work with me? Watch me evaluate pitches on The Dialogue Doctor podcast!
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Today is Just Because Day! Do something for no reason today. Wear mismatched socks. Have dessert before dinner. Take an unplanned drive.
Writers are terrible at spontaneity. We have trained ourselves to make everything count. The hour has to produce pages, the trip has to be research, the movie has to be studied. Even our rest gets justified. We call it filling the well, because we can't just watch a bad movie in the middle of the afternoon.
But creativity doesn't only come from effort. A lot of it comes from the two things effort tends to squeeze out: novelty and play.
Novelty gives you something to work with.
Your imagination doesn't invent out of nothing. It recombines. Everything you make is built out of things you've noticed, and the trouble with a settled life is that you stop noticing. Same route, same coffee shop, same corner of the internet. Put yourself somewhere unfamiliar and your brain starts noticing things, filing things away for your next story.
Play turns off our inner critic.
The other thing that happens when something is pointless is that it can't fail. There's no standard to fall short of, no one to disappoint, nothing riding on it. This is the magic of kids’ creation. They create without worry. Channel your inner eight year-old. Silliness isn't the opposite of serious work. It's the state serious work comes out of.
Be silly! Play! Goof off! Create!
Three Silly Things To Try to Reboot Your Creativity
1. Break one rule of your writing routine.
Change it for a week. Write longhand instead of on the computer. Take a walk and dictate a chapter. Write after dinner instead of in the morning. Write the last scene first. This is not a productivity hack. It’s a way to unlock your brain and boost your creativity.
2. Do something that you've never done because it doesn't interest you.
Buy a ticket to a sport you've never watched: minor league baseball, high school wrestling, a rodeo. Find the small, strange museum devoted to a subject you have zero interest in: barbed wire, telephones, mustard. The lack of interest is the point. You're not there to gather material. You're there to be an outsider, which forces you to look at everything, because you don't know yet what's worth looking at.
3. Try a genre you don’t like.
If there's a genre you always avoid, experience it. Watch a western, read a romance, go to the opera! What would your story be like if you changed genres? Is there something new you could incorporate in your work in progress?
Or just have the ice cream
If the week is already full, do the small version. Have ice cream for breakfast. Pay for a stranger’s coffee. Wear a hat. These take five minutes to remind you that not everything you do has to be productive to be worth doing. No reason required .
I'd love to hear about your adventures! Hit reply and tell me if your Just Because experiment sparked any new ideas.
Ever wonder what it’s like to work with me? Watch me evaluate pitches on The Dialogue Doctor podcast!
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If this blog adds a little spark to your writing week, would you consider buying me a coffee? Your support helps me keep creating practical, joyful resources for writers.
Buy my bookHow to Turn Your Screenplay into a Novel! Turn your scripts into books and start earning money today!
Last week we talked about how old and new friendships are structured differently — how you build a bond from zero, and how you fake twenty years of history with a McDonald’s pickle.
This week we’re drilling down and talking about men’s friendships, which come in three flavors.
The buddy action movie is about a mission. Two guys, one problem, and a friendship that grows in the cracks while they solve it.
The bromance is about the friendship. The relationship is the plot, and it follows romantic comedy beats.
The male friendship drama is about what they mean to one another.
Three very different ways of portraying a male best friendship. All emotional, all powerful, and audience pleasing.
The Buddy Action Movie
The buddy action movie focuses on an external mission. Catch the criminals. Transport the witness. Survive the day. Lethal Weapon is the classic template. Riggs and Murtaugh are opposites, a suicidal loose cannon and family man on the verge of retirement. They become brothers, but the plot is about drug dealers and murder.
The mission is doing double duty. It’s your plot, and it’s also your excuse to keep two people in a car together who would never otherwise share a meal. Different missions generate different flavors of that forced proximity.
Riggs and Murtaugh in Lethal Weapon
Police, Feds, and Other Badges
This is the biggest bucket by a mile, and there’s a structural reason for that. A badge is free glue. Partners get assigned to each other and they can’t quit. You don’t have to invent a reason these two are stuck together. The precinct does it for you.
Unlike a law enforcement officer, a PI doesn’t have an assigned partner. To solve this problem, these stories usually pair a professional with an amateur who desperately needs him, because the need is the only thing holding them together.
The Nice Guys are a clumsy private detective and a tough enforcer who team up to find a missing girl when their cases converge
Who Framed Roger Rabbit? chains a toon-hating detective to an actual toon.
Sherlock Holmes (2009) takes the famous consulting detective and partner and reboots them as an action movie with their friendship at the center.
Criminals Partnered with Professionals
These are mismatched-authority pairs. One of them has institutional backing and the other doesn’t. One can arrest. The other can only run. That asymmetry is a gift. Every scene has a built-in power imbalance feeding the conflict.
48 Hrs. puts a convict into a cop’s custody for two days.
Midnight Run sends a bounty hunter across the country with an embezzling accountant.
The Hitman’s Bodyguard assigns a bodyguard to a hitman.
Zootopia pairs a rabbit cop out to prove herself with a fox con artist.
Treasure and Adventure
Swap the crime for a quest and the dynamic shifts. Nobody’s chasing these guys because of who they are. Instead, they are the bad guys' targets for what they are doing. Which means the glue has to be enthusiasm rather than obligation.
Sahara gives us Dirk and Al, who’ve been friends since kindergarten and share an operational shorthand the audience never gets translated.
Shanghai Noon crosses a Chinese Imperial Guard with an outlaw.
National Treasure pairs a historian who believes every legend with a hacker who believes none of them.
Civilians in Over Their Heads
No badge, no training, no license. Just two ordinary guys and a situation that has gotten dramatically out of hand.
Playdate (2025) turns a laid-off dad and another dad from the park into mercenary bait.
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) hands time travel to two people who should not have it.
In Shaun of the Dead (2004) the zombies aren’t really the problem, the friendship is.
What About Women?
The buddy action movie has been overwhelmingly male for most of its history. The genre grew out of cop movies and war movies, and the casting followed. Recently, that’s changed.
The Heat (2013) puts an uptight FBI agent and a Boston cop through every beat of the Lethal Weapon structure, losing nothing in translation.
The Spy Who Dumped Me (2018) sends two best friends into an international conspiracy.
Ride or Die (2026) has an assassin and a civilian fleeing across Europe.
Notice that none of these had to redesign the genre. If you’ve been assuming your buddy action premise needs two men in it, it doesn’t. It needs two people who solve problems differently and can’t get away from each other.
The Bromance
The bromance applies the beats of a romantic comedy to a platonic male friendship, complete with meet-cute, the montage, the third-act falling out, and the run-through-the-airport. Same skeleton, no kissing.
I Love You, Man is the purest example— a man with no male friends goes on a series of increasingly excruciating man-dates to find a best man for his wedding.
Step Brothers starts with a hostile meet-cute, has a rapid falling-in-love montage, and the third-act split, and a grand-gesture reunion at the Catalina Wine Mixer. If you swapped one of them for a woman, you’d have a Nancy Meyers film.
Superbad is a friendship movie wearing a party movie’s clothes. The entire plot exists because Seth and Evan are about to be separated by college. It pays off with a drunken confession in adjacent sleeping bags, a mortified morning after, and a final scene where the two of them part ways on escalators moving in opposite directions.
Male Friendship Drama
Just two guys and what they meant to each other.
Male friendship as main plot doesn’t require comedy. This is male friendship drama, where the friendship is the whole story and nobody’s joking.
Brian’s Song (1971) set the standard for the genre. Two competing running backs get assigned as roommates, become inseparable, and then one of them gets sick. There is no villain to punch and no misunderstanding to clear up. The complication is terminal.
In The Shawshank Redemption (1994) the escape is the plot, but the thing the movie is actually about is Andy and Red’s friendship.
Stand by Me (1986) centers on an adult remembering the friends he had at twelve and admitting he never had friends like that again.
Notice what these have in common with the bromance and what they don’t. Same central question — what do these two mean to each other? Completely different tone, and, crucially, no reconciliation beat. You can’t run the third-act reunion when the separation is death, or prison, or just the passage of time. The drama version has to find its catharsis somewhere else.
Three buckets. Same two guys
The difference between a buddy action movie, a bromance, and a friendship drama isn't the men. It isn't even the plot. Lethal Weapon and Brian's Song are both about two men who become essential to each other. One has a drug cartel and one has a hospital room.
What changes is where you focus the story.
Have a mission, and the friendship grows while the bullets fly.
Focus on the relationship and play it for laughs, and you've got a bromance.
Point at the relationship and play it straight, and you've got the hardest and most durable version of all. No villain. No punchline. Just what these two meant to each other.
Ever wonder what it’s like to work with me? Watch me evaluate pitches on The Dialogue Doctor podcast!
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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!
Ever wonder what it’s like to work with me? Watch me evaluate pitches on The Dialogue Doctor podcast!
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If this blog adds a little spark to your writing week, would you consider buying me a coffee? Your support helps me keep creating practical, joyful resources for writers.
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