How to Cut Corners to Quickly Produce the Reader's Tears

Although many of the tips I shared above are perhaps used by all writers, my aim is not to teach you how to be a screen writer or a novelist. (I do not have the calling or the skills to do that anyways.) What I can do, however, is share with you how I have bent -- or broken --conventional writing advice in order to write emotionally powerful grants under the pressure of significant and unalterable due dates. 

1. Don't Worry About Originality

Traditional writing coaches caution us not to plagiarize someone else's work. They may even teach their students not to risk plagiarism in the first place by even trying to take inspiration from books, movies or popular television shows. As a grant writer, however, some of my greatest successes have involved copying, almost word-for-word, an existing story that made me tear up and simply changing a few of the details to match the experiences of my non-profit client. When you are preparing a last minute grant because the previous grant writer passed out from overwork and exhaustion you can always rely on proven stories to work in your favor. If this bothers your conscience, you can take comfort in assuming that as you go through the rewriting and editing process that you and your team (boss) will make enough minor changes to personalize and make your material fresh. 

'This Is Us': The 11 most gut-wrenching moments that made us cry this season (so far).

2. Don't Worry About Being Sappy

Novelists and playwrights have the time it takes to create exotic or complex emotional situations. Grant writers do not. We have no choice but to be sappy which basically means we have an un-limited license to write in a manner which is overly sweet or sentimental. A choice which would seem lazy or silly or predictable in a major motion picture can nevertheless succeed in a grant proposal because we have a different format, an extremely limited exposure to our reader, and we need to balance out the other parts of the application which can be very dry including the budget or our goals and objectives. 

3. Embrace Cliches

As grant writers, we are not really in the business of creating brand new characters who have deliberately different or idiosyncratic emotional reactions. We do not have the time. Instead, we need to latch on to overly familiar or commonplace applicable story elements which, in another context, would rightly be considered cliches. We can produce tear provoking material at short notice by polishing up and reusing cliches which are already known to hook readers and draw them into an appropriate empathetic response. Therefore, we can get away with telling stories that include a child who loses a father to a gang attack (Lion King, 1994), a husband's fight to maintain custody of his son after his unfaithful wife leaves him (Kramer vs. Kramer, 1979), or a wife diagnosed with early onset dementia whose Alzheimer's stresses her family life (Still Alice, 2014).

4. Add Emotion Enhancing Coincidences

When we tell stories in real life, we typically add in amazing coincidences. Although writing instructors would disagree, it is okay for us to create scenes where the rains start to fall the moment your character gets sad news, or sees a beautiful sunset as an answer to a prayer. In grant writing, we have a poetic license which allows us to report scenes that have as much emotional punch as possible.

5. Don't Rewrite or Revise Too Much

While your initial draft of your story should make you cry do not get disappointed if you do not feel the same emotional impact after you are on your seventh or eighth edit. When you get bored or numb to your own story it will actually hurt you if you take the time to rewrite your material in order to create an improved emotional impact on yourself. Instead, I have found it useful to assume that the reader, who will be reading the story for the first time, will most likely have the same initial emotional experience as I did when I first created my over-the-top tear producing story. 

How to Grab Your Audience by Leveraging Emotional Power in Your Grant Proposal

Technically, people cry as they read a story because they are emotionally engaged with the main character and then that character suffers some sort of loss. To complete this task a novelist has a lot of advantages that grant writers do not. For example, a novelist has a whole book length manuscript to use to build up a powerful identification with the main character. As grant writers our task is much more difficult because we do not have that luxury of time and space. If we are going to make readers cry we need to accomplish our objective much more quickly, in perhaps a page or even a paragraph. To pull this off, we need to focus with precision and line up as many of the most significant causal factors as we can in our appeal.

1. Tear Up Yourself

If you can write stuff that makes you cry, then you will already be half way to your goal. As you may know, method actors typically draw on their own experiences when a director asks them to do a crying scene. Method acting coaches get actors to cry by asking them to remember their most painful experiences such as the loss of a child, a parent or even a pet. Transferring your own saddest reactions into the text is probably the quickest, fastest and most reliable way to get your readers to cry. If this is not within your comfort zone, then you will need to lean more heavily on the other factors that generate tears. Personally, I recommend using all of them including a likable characters, sad settings, poignant moments and engaging details. 

How his fans cause Milo Ventimiglia, who plays the father in This is Us, cry with their stories.

2. Focus on an Identifiable, Likable Character

To quickly get your reader to identify with your main character, you need to create - or find - one who immediately becomes a likable and easy to identify with figure for the reader. One of the most effective uses of this technique is the animal cruelty television ads which cause the viewer to immediately identify with a lonely, hurting, frightened, malnourished and yet still cute and cuddly dog, horse or cat. So, in order to set up the reader's tears, you must immediately share extremely positive, even heroic information about your client.

3. Draw on Familiar Family Situations

One of the best way to speed up the reader's tears is to present them with character types which are already highly familiar to them. For example, it is best to focus on a mother or a father, a brother or a sister, or a son or a daughter. By focusing on family members you automatically tap into your reader's own powerfully charged emotions surrounding their own family members. This is, by the way, one of the key techniques leveraged by the writers of the This is Us series. The show would not be able to routinely provoke intense emotional reactions if the characters were dealing with distant relatives, strangers, or unfamiliar situations. 

4. Place Your Story in an Extremely Sad Setting

Just as the animal cruelty videos feature animals in cages and bleak environments, you can use the descriptive setting of your story to immediately establish a mood conducive to sad, compassionate emotions. For example, you would quickly lose points if your started telling a sad story based on a sunny Mediterranean beach. Instead, it is more effective to pick a setting that basically screams sadness and misery including being out in the rain, in the cold snow, in extreme heat, or in dull, sterile and oppressive environments like tunnels, alley ways, hospitals, prisons, courtrooms, cemeteries and so on. The setting creates a depressing mood which facilitates your reader's saddest associations. Another way to remember this point is to understand that anything in your setting which is bright or happy will distract your reader from the character's painful loss. 

5. Don't Be Shy About Leveraging the Pain

As a grant writer, you have the reader's permission to engage in a level of hyperbole or exaggeration that would be over-the-top for a novelist or a screenwriter. For example, if it is sad for a child to lose a finger, then you might be better off choosing to tell the story about the child who lost a hand or an arm. Give yourself the freedom to push your own boundaries and focus on the elements of the client's story which are extremely painful. If you push yourself as hard as you can, you will probably be moving in the right direction. No matter what, you can always scale it back. The problem for most grant writers, however, is that they are too shy to push the readers into an extremely upsetting situation. 

6. Focus on Creating a Single Poignant Moment

Since we do not have much time, it makes sense to immediately establish an incredibly sad moment. The good news is you do not need a series of sad incidents to get the grant reader to a gut-wrenching moment, it is enough to build quickly to a single climactic moment where all the character's pain, loss and suffering is most acute. Creating a concentrated peak moment is useful, in part, because it focuses your attention and make the most of your existing skills as a drama writer. Of course, a short single poignant moment will also be easier for you to refine or share with your grant writing team. Here, the fastest way to get your reader to cry is to focus on a story where someone has to go away or leave for whatever reason. For example, if you have ever taken one of my workshops, then you will remember how sad it was at the end of the day when the workshop came to an end and we all packed up to go home.  

7. Add Vivid Details

Finally, you will immediately gain your reader's attention by seeding into your story some unique, striking details. For example, you might write about the dust on a teddy bear's button eyes, or the smell of an apple, or anything that quickly gets your reader visualizing a concrete, specific imaginary moment. Personally, I have found it useful to seed into my story details which connect with each of the five senses including sight, hearing, smell, taste or touch. Again, if you try this please give yourself permission to be bold. You can always scale back the details later on if you must. 

How to Encourage Your Team to Think Creatively and to Improvise as Well.

In addition to the improvisation you do yourself as a grant writer, it is also important to know tools for helping your grant writing team improvise as well. Too often a lack of creative energy can be traced to the fact that various team members may be afraid of failing. With this motivation, they may be more creative inventing reasons for giving up than coming up with solutions that will make it happen. Below, I will share with you the five most important techniques I have used to help my teams improvise like jazz musicians. 

The Lion's Cage (Charlie Chaplin), Music Composed by Colin Bruce

1. Do the Right Thing

I picked up this idea from George H.W. Bush. As a vice-president and former director of the CIA, the elder Bush had a lot of experience in working with appointed and career government staff. One of his techniques was to simply ask his team: "What would we do if we wanted to do the right thing?" Of course, this seems a little funny because we assume that everyone would naturally want to do the right thing. Bush's question was an acknowledgement that international relations is an opaque business and that often it is not possible to do the right thing if it creates other disadvantages and risks. Nevertheless, I am fond of asking this question because it challenges staff to really check their own agendas and respond with high quality solutions which represent an ideal answer to a question. Once you have their innovative answers on the table, you can always scale them back and do what is most practical at the moment. 

2. Time and Plan Your Improvisation Challenges

Typically, any grant writing team has enthusiasts and doubters. Both have a role in the grant writing process. In my experience it is best to start out with the enthusiasts, they are the ones who will be most energetic and committed to making the grant happen. With them, I encourage their spontaneous comments and ask them to elaborate on their enthusiasms. It is only late in the process - after a draft or two - that I invite the doubters to take a shot at the proposal. At this stage, their negativity will point out holes in the document. Based on their comments, I will get a solid list of issues which need to be sorted out and fixed as the grant moves forward. One question I ask the doubters is "What can we do to make the grant work to your satisfaction?" 

3. Out Crazy the Crazies

One of my favorite techniques of improvisation is to run with a crazy idea and, in a sense, out crazy the craziest person in the room. For example, someone may say that we should provide free equipment to students. (Clearly impractical.) My response is to suggest that we give them free clothes, movie tickets and automobiles. The impact of this approach is that I have loosened up the thinking of the group, helped them think outside the box, and made them more comfortable with speaking their minds. This technique is really most helpful when the crazy comment is really delivered by a crazy person. You might also try the reverse crazy technique which is to suggest to the group that they do the exact opposite of what they expect. This approach helps them zero in on the merits of the project simply because extinguishing it has been placed on the table. 

4. Take Money Off the Table

Another way to open up your group to innovation is to ask "What would we do if money was no object and we were certain to succeed?" This question gives your team the freedom to dream the best possible solution. They get to shoot for the stars. This approach actually yields surprising results since some ideas of the staff and administrators may not be so expensive or risky after all. There might be ways to approximate the things they want to do by using new technology, borrowed resources, or key donations. No matter what, you will get fresh ideas and the motivation to proceed. 

5. Make it Personal

Finally, it sometimes helps to touch the heart and highest aspirations of your team by asking "What would you do if it was your own mother or daughter in this program?" The responses to this question often elicit surprisingly sensitive, thoughtful, and decisive answers. It works, in part, because it gives the team members a simpler problem to solve. They are solving the problem of their own, for their own family, without regard to the objections and concerns of non-family members. Even though their ideas might highlight their personal values, the ideas themselves will probably be at least 80% of the way to the correct solution. 

If you remember to apply these techniques when you and your team are threatened by writer's block, then you will quickly find new avenues which restore your freshness, confidence and energy. As long as what you write works for you, you should be in good shape. This is true even if you are entirely unfamiliar with the topic of your grant application.

Succeeding When the Pressure is Great: The Five Most Important Tips for Effective Improvisation

The need for improvisation in grant writing is the logical consequence of the requirement to write long, original, persuasive documents under tight deadlines about topics that are unfamiliar. Due to severe time constraints, the grant writer will never have the time to adequately research their topic. If they are afraid of improvising, then they may deny themselves and their team adequate time to review and revise the grant proposal. After all, keep in mind multiple revisions are needed and will be made to make the document perfect. Below, I list my five most important tips for effective improvisation. 

"Big Bear Lake Scene," oil on canvas 18" x 24" by John C. Drew, Ph.D.

1. Trust Yourself

In an emergency situation, it always makes sense to begin by trusting your own gut instincts. Often the program managers at your charity may have no clue how to organize their work either. Your best guess at the way to proceed may actually win the team over and impress the funder. Plus, if you are sincerely happy with what you are writing then you are probably at least 80% of the way toward identifying the ideal elements of a winning grant proposal including the needs statement, the program solution, and the evaluation measures. Regardless, the key is to keep writing no matter what. When you read what you have written the next day you may be surprised by the quality of your work and the internal coherence of your arguments. 

2. Play the Worst, Average, Best Game

If I am stuck about the best course to follow as I'm writing a grant, I like to play a little game called Worst, Average and Best. I begin by thinking about a serious issue and then ask myself what the absolute worst solution would be. I don't know why, but imagining the absolutely worst solution, the solution that would make things much worse tends to clear my mind and gives me a foundation on which to build. I then ask myself what would be an average solution to the problem. Here, my brain generates traditional answers to immediate questions. I have found that this question tends to trigger my existing memory and pull up ideas and procedures or thoughts which I hadn't previously considered. The next step, however, is what makes this game so satisfying. I ask myself what would be the best possible solution to the problem? Out of this question, I have often found surprising solutions that appear in my mind. These are ideas that are grounded in the literature and are simple, effective, and creative. Even if my idea is off base, however, I still go with it. The staff of the agency or its leadership may or may not agree with my take, but - at the very least - I have done my duty by providing them with my best original insight. In times of crisis, I have found that playing the Worst, Average, and Best game has often led me to powerful solutions that make me feel quite confident about what I am writing or doing for a client or for workshop participants. 

3. Reverse Conventional Wisdom

One of the best improvisational techniques in my repertoire comes from my graduate school mentor, the late, Theodore J. Lowi. He taught me that it was frequently useful to take an idea and then explore the practicality of its complete opposite. For example, one of the truisms of grant writing is that the best pathway to winning is to follow the funder's directions. It would be folly to ignore this advice. Yet, we can imagine the creative ideas that might emerge if we reversed this saying and thought instead, the best pathway to winning is NOT to follow the funder's directions. How might that be true? As I ask myself the question it occurs to me that the best way to win grants, in reality, is to know a board or staff member of the foundation and have them recommend you to the funder. Some funders expressly ask you not to do this. Nevertheless, this is one sure way to win grants. This idea might not have occurred to me if I did not experiment with reversing the original shibboleth. 

4. Makeup Facts and Figures Just to Keep Writing

The only practical solution is to recognize your own strengths and weaknesses and do your best at improvising when you run across mainly unfamiliar matters. Whatever inadequacies this creates are relatively minor since other readers on your team should be able to revise the document and make it more realistic. This is why, in my seminars, I recommend that you write a draft of the whole grant first and then do the research for the document. 

5. Google It

The internet has been one of the greatest blessings for grant writers in a hurry. If I am stuck on something, I am usually pleasantly surprised when a quick Google search of keywords or a name brings up a Wikipedia article or some other resources which fill me in on the topic. The Wikipedia entries are particularly useful when they contain recent footnotes. Even so, I and you need to check those links. Too often the source cited in the Wikipedia article is no longer available, at least in its original form. When I bump up against paywalls, I usually just make do with the article summary and rely on the agency staff to verify my take on the article in question. My associate grant writers are particularly adept at finding key information on the internet. In one case, an associate grant writer found step-by-step directions for creating fish ponds. We were able to use this document in our draft grant proposal and the client, who built fish ponds himself, seemed perfectly okay with what was submitted.