How To Write Using Cultural Shorthand

If Seinfeld won acclaim for being “a show about nothing,” then Friends had a similar brilliantly minimal premise: “a show about six friends.”

“What’s it about?”

“It’s about friends.”

That’s all it took, and even that three-word reply was unnecessary. After all, the answer was there in the title.

Beyond that single, dead-simple premise, the plots could be anything. Ross could try a spray tan and end up able to sing a duet of “Ebony and Ivory” all by himself. Joey could try and fail to learn French. Phoebe could discover that her twin sister did porn. Chandler and Monica could go for aborted engagement photos, or Rachel could get a crush on and then embarrass herself in front of a customer named Josh-u-a. It only mattered that those six characters kept getting together, staying friends, and hanging out.

And hanging out.

Friends was among the final wave of truly pre-Internet television shows. When it debuted in 1994, there was an “information superhighway,” but few people knew what to do with it, or even how to get on. We didn’t all have iPhones; we didn’t Facebook every moment of our lives; we didn’t communicate with texts. You could look around a public room and see faces in 1994. Today you see the tops of people’s heads, while their thumbs are working devices.

Friends has endured so well because it was a great show with terrific characters that came along at the perfect time. But it’s more than that, too. We don’t just look back on that ten-year sitcom as the story of six people hanging out together. We also look nostalgically back to a lost time when six people would actually bother to get together in person.

You don’t see that as much today. And so a lot of us who barely see our own friends in person look at Friends as this example of what human relationships are supposed to be like — and still would be like, if we could just put down our phones and reconnect. The theme song says, “I’ll be there for you.” And deep down, that’s what we all want and maybe aren’t getting as much as we’d like: to know that whatever happens in our lives, someone will always be there to help us see our way through it.

In the absence of true connection, shows like Friends fill the void.

I know many people who have seen the entire series several times. Both my writing partner Johnny and I — thanks to our own fandom as well as that of our Friends-loving wives — have seen some episodes dozens of times.

Jokes stick in your head. You get the references. You haven’t just seen the show; you’ve internalized it. Friends has become part of your reality — and, more to the point, part of your vocabulary. “Going on a break” means something other than taking time out from an activity for people like us. Maybe you can’t stop thinking of Thursday as “the third day” or can’t recall the movie Die Hard without hearing it in a shout: “DIE HARD!” Personally, I can’t hear someone say “moot point” without recalling Joey’s version: a moo point — which just doesn’t matter, like a cow’s opinion.

Here’s what all of this has to do with writing and idea generation.

If you and I both know all the above jokes and references, it means we share the same vocabulary, the same frames of reference. We can both point to something that happened on the show and say, “Remember when Joey got his head stuck in the turkey?” as if we’d both been there in person to see it.

That huge base of common experience creates a bridge between us, as writer and reader.

I probably haven’t met you, but if we’re both Friends fans then I know exactly how I might talk to you. If I’m trying to explain something and can’t quite make you understand, I could use our shared experiences as a kind of cultural shorthand.

If I’m trying to explain a situation where someone was unduly jealous, I might say, “It’s like when Ross was threatened by Rachel’s handsome co-worker Mark.”

If I’m having trouble describing a borderline OCD person who likes things obsessively neat, I might say, “She’s like Monica.”

And if I’m trying to tell you about a person who wanted to be forced into a guilty pleasure so they’d have an excuse for selling out (a tricky thing to even type, let alone describe), I might point you to the time Phoebe fell in love with Pottery Barn, which she’d previously hated … and then tried getting Rachel to coerce her into buying something she wanted from a Pottery Barn window: “Rachel, are you saying you’ll move out if I don’t buy that lamp?”

It’s a bit like seeking people who speak your language in a foreign country. If I only speak English and you only speak Russian, we’re not going to communicate well. All we’ll be able to do is pick up plates and say, “Plate.” It’s basic stuff: if you want to get your ideas across, you need a common vocabulary.

But as a writer who wants to communicate effectively with your readers, you need more than a common word vocabulary. You must have stories in common as well.

Friends is so valuable to Sterling & Stone because it lets us speak in shorthand as collaborators. If Johnny doesn’t quite get one of my ideas, I’ll say, “It’s like when Ross was trying to hide the copier shop girl from Rachel after he cheated on her,” and he’ll understand immediately.

The same shortcuts are even more valuable when focused outward — away from collaborative partners and toward your reader base. Thanks to the show’s massive cross-generational popularity, many readers speak that same “idea language,” too … and so we as writers can take the same shortcuts in talking to them as I do when talking with Johnny.

Now obviously, you can’t drop a Friends reference in the middle of your thriller to make the reader understand. But you can use the same core idea as a bit of easily understandable cultural shorthand to make your reader more deeply feel the story.

If you’re writing a couple and your plot calls for them to break up for reasons you’d like the reader to agree with, you might make one of your characters really unlikable or annoying. That way, when they break up, people will say, “Good thing they broke up. That character was obnoxious!”

Like Janice, who was obnoxious to the point of absurdity.

Or like Will — the character played by Brad Pitt in a Thanksgiving episode, who snapped at Rachel the entire time because he’d carried a chip on his shoulder since high school.

Or maybe you need an ominous character for your suspense novel. Do you know who was plenty ominous, once you stripped the humor away? Eddie, Chandler’s short-time roommate, played by Adam Goldberg. Cues from Eddie’s behavior (manic episodes alternated with anger, jealousy, a relationship breakup that deeply wounded him, obliviousness to Chandler’s demands that he leave) could easily be incorporated into any number of maniac characters. Hell, Eddie wasn’t terribly different from Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character in Single White Female.

Are you getting the idea? You’re not going to stuff your stories with Friends trivia; you’re going to acknowledge that Friends is both a cultural touchstone (which gives our society common memories) and a cultural mirror (which reflects fiction’s most common picture of how the world is). You don’t want to use Ross and Rachel’s first breakup verbatim if you want to use shorthand in your story. Instead, study it for cues as to what causes breakups in good stories, how the characters react, and how those breakups are (in most cases, for primary characters, depending on genre) eventually resolved.