Your Friends Can Destroy You

Your Friends Can Destroy You

We're taught to universally encourage our friends and support them.  However - what we're not educated about is how.  We are also not informed that our friends encouragement can destroy us despite their best intentions.

There are two ways.

1) Nothing but Encouragement. 

We don't like hurting our friend's feelings.  We want them to like us - and usually that means saying nice things to them even when we might be thinking otherwise.  It could be anything from "I loved your scrīpt!" when you really didn't care for it much to not mentioning anything about your friend who is slowly becoming an alcoholic because you don't want to be judgmental about how they are living their lives.  

The problem here is that most people assume that their friends are watching out for them.  If not them, who?  It's true that some people do not take criticism well - but isn't that the test of a friendship?  In fact, I think that just how in writing watching your characters in diverse circumstances creates a relationship between the audience and the character that friendship is the same way.  Exactly the thing which you are afraid of is the thing which will end up bonding you together.

If you are the one who needs to criticize instead of praise - simply do it with love and softly.  People hear criticism louder than they hear compliments.  So - begin any criticisms with "I" and use specifics (to make it tangible).    "I felt detached from your characters - I wanted to root for the hero but I felt he was just plain mean spirited and not acting like a hero."  "I feel like when you get drunk all the time when we go out, you are just avoiding spending any real time with me."

2) Giving you their best advice.

If one didn't surprise you, maybe 2 did.  William Goldman (a screenwriter) has a simple but infamous quote "Nobody knows anything."  Sometimes it seems like they do though.  Or, at least, they should.  But they know things for themselves.  They don't know them for you.  

Let's say you get to know someone who is very well established in your chosen profession and they toss out all kinds of advice all the time because they like you.  They want you to succeed -t hey care about you.  And you start following this advice - and it's not working.  But you stick to it because it worked for them - you do everything they did and it isn't working.  The problem is... you are not them  

What you needed to do was not do what they did but learn how the think about the profession.  Let's say this person is a movie producer who makes nothing but horror films and even more - everyone is saying horror films are selling like hot-cakes.  Obviously you should be making horror films.  So you start writing them and pitching them and trying to set up deals.  The only problem is - you don't go watch horror films  even.  You don't like them.  You think "Hey - that's okay I'll do my own version of a horror film."  But suddenly you're not doing what they are doing and you don't realize it.  They are doing the kind of horror films the world wants to see - you are doing something else.  So what should you have done instead?  Step back a bit.  See, they LOVE horror films.  It's not that they are making horror films - it's that they are making films they love!

So you have to think first - what do you love.  Then you can watch how they put a package together.  You can pick up their language and systems and savvy.  You can learn a lot from them and in their mind they might think "boy, you should be doing horror films" - but that's because they love them on some level.

So - while role modeling can be very helpful.  You need to be sure you are interpreting the model correctly or your role models will ruin you.