Long before even an inchoate notion of this blog existed, I heard this line of advice: there are no best friends. This particular piece of advice has nothing to do with creating this blog, but it does have something to do with writing. I can’t recall who said it or where I read it—so don’t give me any credit for its use, I just live and write by it.
Despite the words, the advice doesn’t actually refer to the existence of best friends. Instead, it pokes fun at one dimensional characters in a story: specifically, the best friend who exists for the sole purpose of providing the main character companionship. If you are blessed with a best friend, stop and think about them. Is it obvious that they don’t exist to be your sidekick? Unless you have a potentially unhealthy relationship, your best friend thinks for themselves, loves what they love, and has their own goals that often depart from your own. Sure, there can be overlap between close friends, but they rarely exist to serve the singular role of being your best friend.
In writing stories, however, this happens too often. Flat characters pop up like weeds in a meadow and nose hairs on an old man: there seems to be no end to them.
I am definitely not the first to notice this (especially since a better writer and observer brought it to my attention) and I won’t be the last. Yet, my interest in mentioning it here goes a touch deeper than repeating writing advice: this statement is true in real life as well.
The crux of There are no best friends is that people consider themselves the focal point of their own life. Put in writing terms, they are the protagonist of their own story. That is, people are selfish.
We can pretend and wish and teach people to not be selfish, but we are. When we are hungry in the morning, our first thought isn’t I wonder if my neighbor’s relationship is doing well. Even if we eventually get there (usually after eating, and then seeing our neighbor), we don’t start there. Our thoughts are selfish because they come from within ourself.
The world around us is projected (or absorbed) into our body through our own senses and is then constructed within our minds by our own knowledge and biases. It only makes sense that, because the world literally flows through us, we would think it revolves around us.
So how does There are no best friends help us in real life?
Well, the phrase exists to remind writers to create interesting and lifelike characters because a simple, flat one is not an interesting one. They don’t ring true to life since people are much more complicated. And while in a story complexity makes a character interesting to read, in real life, the opposite seems to apply. We want simple people. As such, we go about simplifying the complexities, the confusion, the discrepancies, and the disliked actions and thoughts that come with being human until we craft a faux binary world. A square for a cube. A painting for a window.
There are no best friends, there are only people with their own thoughts, desires, and beliefs. And they hold them just as close and selfishly as we hold our own. The advice isn’t a secret, only a reminder—a helpful phrase to slow us down when writing, to make us take an extra minute to consider the character we are looking at. And I’d say that’s what we need outside of stories: take an extra minute to consider the individual we are looking at. To them, they are the hero—because there are no best friends.
Love:
An individual,
~K
K 