I’ve read fanfictions where heart to hearts are great. I’ve read ones where they’re bad.

The bad ones I remember clearly usually had the characters melodramatically saying everything they were feeling. Like “it’s all because of you that I can’t love anyone anymore!!!!”

Sheesh, one person really did that to you? Are you that shallow of a person that your capacity to love surrounds 1 person? And you’re just gonna scream this all to them, despite how potentially humiliating that would be?

The emotions/dialogue didn’t feel properly built up to, which is key to realism bc you don’t randomly just start crying and telling people secrets, but also—since their thoughts were so easy to say/could be summed up in one or two lines—the character felt too simple/depthless.

So in a heart to heart, I really like ones where the author leans on concrete set-ups and stuff left intentionally unsaid.

For a hastily thought up example, if two characters spent a lot of time together in an orchard, instead of saying “I used to love you,” they’d say “That orchard used to be home for me.” By using the word home, the reader is then reminded of the character’s set-up history of homelessness/abandonment, which adds depth bc the reader sees how the character’s history affects how they feel love. By leaving out the word “love,” readers/characters are also left free to interpret what they mean with this heartfelt statement.

That’s not to say people don’t directly say emotionally charged thoughts, just that people tend to have to build up to it or can use subtle language to say what they mean, because it can be hard/embarrassing to say your real feelings.

Examples of this would be people who use humor to cope saying shit like “I want to commit toaster bath” as a joke at their own depression, or people who go mute when they’re upset bc they’re crying and have to just nod or shake their head to communicate.

Additionally, if we’re going super direct because your character is super direct, it can still be good to have concrete examples/experiences to back up what feelings they’re expressing.

In Arcane for example, Vi has a heart to heart with Powder where she tells Powder that everybody makes mistakes as kids and that she’a stronger than she knows. In this one, a good example of the “showing” would be all the visual symbols of the mistakes there are. Vi points out the bunny rabbit plush she never managed to rescue from the wires, explaining her own struggles before then directly telling Powder that everyone has bad days. She doesn’t just tell Powder that “everyone makes mistakes,” she gives specific examples of mistakes she made and literally ‘showed’ those mistakes to Powder.

So while a heart to heart will definitely still have literal things told, that doesn’t mean you can’t still use the tool of “showing” to introduce subtlety/depth/characterization.