When we watch something that is genuinely heartfelt, it tugs the emotions. It leaves us wondering how we would cope in that situation. Or it can bring us back to a similar life situation that we can relate to. Either way, the impact that genuinely heartfelt writing can have on someone can be the difference between someone watching the next episode or even following the rest of your screenplays in future.

How can you ensure your heartfelt writing comes across as intended? Here are some useful tips that you can employ to ensure that your writing feels genuinely heartfelt. This can result in work that connects to your audience for the long term.

Five Quick Tips For Heartfelt Writing

Make Goals Match The Journey

When a character in your screenplay is on a journey, the audience should clearly understand their reasons for being on that journey. Make sure that the goals of your characters line up with the journey they are undertaking.

Why? Because it makes the challenges they face and the sacrifices they need to make feel more resonant with the audience. Those watching will feel far more connected with the character if they can understand why they are willing to go through the turmoil they face throughout the story.

Make The Goals Realistic

Heartfelt writing tugs on your audience's heartstrings because they can put themselves in that same position. What can you do to ensure that the goals your character chases feel like they would be a suitable pursuit for that individual?

Make sure that you ground the reasons and the journey itself in a sense of realism. You want people to see the character and get emotional as they can imagine being in that situation themselves. Ensuring that a character's goals are a natural result of the issue(s) they face and the problems they wish to resolve helps to create more believable characters overall. 

Show, Don’t Tell

One of the easiest ways to disengage the audience from your screenplay is to be too statement-driven. Telling someone that ‘X character is sad’ will not drive home the fact they are unhappy. It should be explained through their actions and the thoughts they bring up either internally or to another character.

It is easier to show the audience that someone is sad through their actions. Do they break away into a part of the story where they spend time alone? Do they miss an event they had previously made it clear that they were excited to be part of?

Be Specific With Your Emotions

Another key part of writing a heartfelt piece is being as clear and distinct as possible. Instead of telling the audience that ‘a tear rolled down his/her cheek’, show them they are upset. Have your characters undergo a genuine moment of challenge. Instead of relying upon cliché, use examples that clearly show the audience how the person is feeling. Think about how you feel when you are upset: how do you portray that to the audience instead of relying upon generic emotional tells?

Put Yourself In Their Shoes

Putting yourself in the character's shoes is a useful way to ensure that your writing feels genuinely heartfelt to the audience. While you do not want to write every character as just an extension of yourself, as that would get tiring fast, you should use your reactions and emotions as a starting place. 

Think of other people in your life, too. How do they deal with difficulty and emotion? What kind of little tells do they have that make it clear they are emotional? How can you work that into the writing?

Put yourself in the shoes of the character. Does their action or reaction to the situation feel realistic? If not, what has to change?

Creating sincere writing is not easy, but if you ground yourself in realism and use personal experience, you can make it easier to avoid over-expression. It is highly recommended that you look to ground all of your writing in this sense of realism, whether for a screenplay or anything else. Draw from the experience of yourself and the people you know; this helps to create characters who the people watching or reading can connect with, care about, and understand.

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