on Jane Friedman site:

Want to create a journey that resonates on a deep emotional level with your audience? That’s something only your characters can accomplish. Emotion doesn’t arise from plot alone; it stems from the people who inhabit your story.

To bring the reader right into your characters’ experience, you need to collapse narrative distance. A few simple language shifts can take your reader from watching people on the page to feeling like they’re right inside the scene.

This suspension of reality—this total immersion in a character’s experience—is what makes videogames so compelling and addictive. But capturing immersion-level interiority is trickier to do on paper. You don’t have sound and lights and colors and haptic feedback. You don’t have feedback mechanisms like damage indicators and health bars.

You have…words.

But as Margaret Atwood says, “A word after a word after a word is power.”

Here, I’m going to use concrete before-and-after examples for three different emotional states to teach you how to collapse narrative distance so your reader forgets they’re just reading, and instead feels like they’re inside the story.