Deep Immersion: The Five Senses as Scaffolding of the Soul. A 6-Week Masterclass in Characterization, Structure, and Writing that Resonates // with Riham Adly

Have you ever written a story that sounded beautiful but felt empty—is your work merely keeping readers company or truly inspiring them to change?

Are you using imagery only to describe a scene, or are you also using it to reveal a character’s hidden truth and the depth of their soul?

What if your descriptions did more than paint a picture—what if the five senses were doorways to deeper immersion rather than just decorative tools?

Deep Immersion is a pioneering six-week masterclass  in characterization, structure, and writing that resonates.

Deep Immersion is designed to move writers beyond decorative description and into the realm of psychological architecture.

While traditional workshops treat the five senses as mere "seasoning," this course uses them as the scaffolding for characterization and structure.

Grounded in the principles of cognitive psychology, students will explore how a character’s dominant sensory perception reveals their deepest needs, conflicts, and internal truths.

What Makes This Different?

Most writing workshops treat the five senses as "seasoning"—a dash of salt to satisfy a "show, don't tell" requirement. This course pioneers a different path. We use the senses as scaffolding.

Cognitive psychology tells us that the senses a character favors reveal their deepest personality, needs, and conflicts. By mastering Perception and Perspective, you create a lens through which your character sees the world, shaping their desires, their plot, and your own narrative voice. A character reveal is a soul reveal.

Each week will consist of engaging and eye-opening lessons. I designed this course not just to help you write better but to also help you discover how you perceive the world.

Week by Week

Week One | The Sense of Vision: The Architecture of Judgment

The Psychology: What is vision? Is it to see? To watch? To observe? Vision is the sense of distance. It allows us to take in the world without entering it, to judge without participating—to hold reality at arm's length.

The Character: The "visual" person seeks to understand by observing, not by engaging. They are the witness, the judge, the one who sees but is not seen. Their danger is detachment; their gift is clarity.

The Technique: The Framed Narrative. An observer watching an observer. This structure mirrors the visual person's relationship to reality: always outside, looking in. The frame becomes a meditation on the act of seeing itself.

The Work: You’ll write a story using the framed narrative technique, anchored by a protagonist whose primary mode of engaging the world is through vision.

Week Two | The Sense of Hearing: Audition and the Rhythm of Belonging

 The Psychology: Did you hear that? Audition! Is hearing about them or us? Is it about Belonging or an Audition for the movie we want to live in? Auditory processing is tied to rhythm and social connection—the frequency of a lie beneath a promise.

The Character: Attuned to what lies between the words—tone, silence, and music—this character hears the cry beneath the laughter. They are always asking: Do I belong? Am I being heard in return?

The Technique: Stream of Consciousness & The Auditory Echo. By mastering syncopation, varying sentence lengths, and choosing visceral verbs, we show how "seeing with our ears" shifts the prose. We focus on how the world is received, not just how it looks.

 The Work: You’ll write a story that places the reader inside an auditory consciousness—a character whose truth is carried in the music of their thoughts.

Week Three | The Sense of Smell: The Signature Scent of Subtext

The Psychology: A scent is never just a smell. What do you mean when you say a situation "stinks"? Or that you "smell something fishy"? Smell is memory's express lane—the past arriving uninvited.

The Character: These are the leaders and the fixers. Like a bear scenting for salmon, they gather invisible data to map their path. They "sense" a crisis before it breaks the surface, though they risk self-loss by submerging too deeply in the worlds they sniff out.

The Technique: The Proust Effect & Olfactory Synecdoche. Using Synecdoche, we find the one specific "part" of a scent—the damp wool, the burnt butter—to trigger the Proust Effect. Not flashback as exposition—but memory as invasion.

The Work: You’ll write a story where a single olfactory synecdoche triggers a "memory invasion," using the scent to crack the present moment open.

Week Four | The Sense of Taste: The Act of Consumption (Your Gusto)

The Psychology: Taste is experience. The bitter and the sweet in the bittersweet. Why sweet? Why bitter? Why both? To taste is to take the world into your body—an act of trust, or violation.

The Character: This character cannot remain neutral—they are always ingesting the world, always being changed by what they consume. Injustice tastes like metal; love tastes like ripe fruit; neglect tastes like stale water.

The Technique: Metaphorical Ingestion. This technique externalizes internal states by describing emotions and experiences as things the character literally eats. The story isn't just told—it is digested.

The Work: You’ll write a story where the protagonist's internal state is revealed through what they taste, consume, or refuse to swallow.

Week Five | The Sense of Touch: Tactile Verification and Body Ownership

The Psychology: Touch is the sense of Proof. Can you hallucinate the resistance of a wall against your palm? Touch tells us "this is mine"—the ability to distinguish self from other. It is the only sense that requires contact.

The Character: For this character, every connection must be pressed against to be proven real. Every truth must be handled to be believed.

The Technique: Tactile Verification. A method developed for this course, rooted in haptic perception, where the character's first response to any significant moment is physical contact. The prose itself lingers on texture, temperature, and resistance before allowing emotion or meaning to arrive.

The Work: You will ground abstract emotions like grief or love in physical resistance, structuring a work where every "touch" is a verification of existence.

Week Six | The Integration: The Multi-Sensory Lens

The Psychology: In this closing week, we take a broader look at the term "Point of View"—what it serves in terms of distance, intimacy, and perception. No one really relies on just one sense; true reality is a mix and match of sensory inputs—the frequency of being.

 The Character: We explore characters who perceive reality through two or more primary senses. What is it like when a character uses both vision and touch? How does that combination translate into unique personality, conflict, and a deeper transformation?

The Technique: The Integrated Scaffolding. We move into a mix and match format, exploring how shifting between sensory modes affects your diction, syntax, and narrative mode.

The Work: You will finalize your story's structure by ensuring the sensory scaffolding is invisible but unbreakable, ensuring the character’s final transformation is not just read, but felt as a multi-sensory reality.

Who Should Take This Class?

This class is ideal for flash fiction writers, writers of short and long-form fiction, and memoirists. It is very beneficial for those who want to discover the inner workings of the psyche to better plan characters for longer works. The workshop also works for people who use writing as a coping mechanism to help them vent and explore their feelings—and hopefully, through awareness and acceptance, start the healing process.

What to Expect:

Participants should expect to respond to weekly writing prompts, assignments, and revisions, and to read and comment on the work of other participants. Participating in live discussions and sharing work-in-progress will take place through Zoom sessions.

Zoom Schedule: Live sessions take place on consecutive Saturdays from 2:30–3:30 PM EST starting Saturday, June 13, 2026. We’ll create a safe and supportive environment offering respectful support that inspires the development of every writer’s voice. Feedback and critique will be provided to all submitted assignments. Zoom sessions will be recorded and made available to registrants.

Our Digital Classroom: Wet Ink

The Wet Ink platform allows writers to log in on their own time to post comments and critiques directly to the author’s work. You can also view deadlines, track revisions, and watch video or listen to audio.

Archive: At the end of the class, each student will receive an email that contains the archive of all their content and interaction.

Access: The day before class begins, you’ll receive an invitation to join Wet Ink. There are no browser requirements, and Wet Ink is mobile friendly.

If cost is a barrier, we offer scholarships based on income as well as some partial scholarships for people living with serious illness and/or disability or people of color. Please fill out this scholarship application form so that we can find the best way to make the class accessible to you.

What students are saying about learning with Riham:

I know many of you love to write, and, more importantly, love to LEARN. Riham Adly is an incredible writer and teacher. I am so grateful that I gave myself the gift of this course a couple of months ago, and also recommended it to a friend, who also enjoyed the process immensely. — Lisa Boulware Molina

Riham is a phenomenal writing instructor and coach. If you have any interest in writing flash fiction, Jung, Tarot, Dream analysis, and going deep with your writing, this is a a class not to be missed. — Theresa Coty O'Neil

If you are starting to write, like me, you will really benefit from this course. I took Riham Adly's writing courses and they are so thoroughly researched and she introduced me to such new things. It was extremely productive. I highly recommend. — Annie Banerjee

I highly recommend. If you are looking for something different that dives deeply into emotions and other driving motivations that enhance your characters and narrative, don't miss this opportunity. — Lorette C. Luzajic

Where and When Does this Online Course Meet?

Deep Immersion is an asynchronous, online course hosted through the classroom platform, Wet Ink, supported by weekly live Zoom meetings. 

All class materials (lessons, assignments, and extensive resources) will be shared each week in Wet Ink. Students who cannot make a live call have the option of watching or listening to the recording and responding to the prompts/questions in the asynchronous classroom platform, Wet Ink.

The week before class begins, registrants will receive an invitation to the Wet Ink classroom and the Zoom session information.

The Wet Ink platform allows students to log in on their own time to post comments and critiques directly to authors’ works. You can also view deadlines, track revisions, and watch video or listen to audio. At the end of the class, each student will receive an email that contains an archive of all their content and interactions. Wet Ink is mobile-friendly and there are no browser requirements.

About the Teacher

Riham Adly is an award-winning flash fiction writer from Giza, Egypt. She is the author of the flash fiction collection Love is Make-Believe (Clarendon House Publications, 2021). Her work has appeared in over fifty journals, including Litro Magazine, Lost Balloon, and The Flash Flood.

A Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee, Riham’s work is featured in the Best Microfiction 2020 anthology. She has worked as an assistant editor for 101 Words and a first reader for Vestal Review. She is the founder of "Let’s Write Short Stories" and "Let’s Write That Novel" in Egypt and has mentored writers across Cairo for over five years. She designed this course to bridge the gap between cognitive perception and storytelling, offering writers a unique "scaffolding" to build stories that resonate at a soul level.

Technical Questions? If you have any questions about technical requirements, please email tlan.coordinator@gmail.com.