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.