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.
- Tear Up Yourself
If you can write stuff that makes you cry, then you are already halfway 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 likable characters, sad settings, poignant moments, and engaging details.
- 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, easy to imagine 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 a cute and cuddly dog, horse, or cat. So, to set up the reader’s tears, you must immediately share extremely positive, even heroic information about your client.
- Draw on Familiar Family Situations
One of the best ways to speed up the reader’s tears is to present them with character types that 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.
- 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 you 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, alleyways, 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.
- 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.
- 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 makes 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 must 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.
- 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 that 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 if you must.
