Immersive Writing Techniques

There are many techniques that you can use to draw the reader into your story. If you succeed, it creates a powerful, immersive experience for your readers. This is called the art of immersive writing.

The overarching idea is to create a great story that is both believable and enduring. There is no magic tradecraft here, but just the art of writing a good book with amazing characters that readers love, doing interesting and entertaining things (the plot), and a memorable setting. So that's the main ingredients:

1. An intricate setting
2. A weaving plotline
3. Realistic characters that you'd want to spend time with.

Tricks for More Immersive Writing

There are a number of technical tricks that can increase the odds that you'll get it right.

1. Single POV character. The best immersive novels are written from the POV of a single character. You get drawn into the world of that character, and the story gradually builds around them. The downside is that you can't have any sections written from your villain's POV, or by the second half of the couple in a romance. You can write an immersive style in "dual POV" with a different POV character each chapter, but it's hard to pull off well, and inherently less immersive because it divides the reader's experience with the character into two.
2. First person. A truly immersive novel is written in first person, with everything from the "I" perspective. You can write an immersive story in third person (with "he" or "she"), and indeed, many great novels of the past have done so. But a first person narrative is hard to beat because you can see through their eyes and hear their thoughts.
3. Present tense beats past tense. A present-tense novel is more immediate and more in-the-moment than one written in past tense. On the other hand, present tense is a newer style that some older readers won't like, and you can certainly still write a very immersive novel in past tense (it's in the past, but only happened a few seconds ago).
4. In-the-moment writing. One of the tricks to an immersive novel is that everything must be happening right now to the character. This means having lots of scenes in the current time, with lots of dialogue, avoiding or shortening flashbacks, limiting backstory, and lots of "show not tell."
5. Show-not-tell. Immersive writing has lots of "showing" and not much "telling" in the story. This leads to much longer scenes with lots of dialogue and description, but it is much more captivating of the reader.
6. Dialogue wins. The basis of changing a scene from "telling" to "showing" is to add dialogue. An immersive scene shows the reader most of what's said between the main characters. But it has to be meaningful dialogue, which means different things in different genres. Think of the dialogue as a way to carry the plot forward, but in quirky ways. If not the plot, then make the dialogue somehow elucidating of character. Witty banter is the basis of romance (because they don't need a plot).
7. Pseudo-real dialogue. A novel is not reality, but it has to be plausibly believable. This means that dialogue is not exactly realistic. For example, you don't include many interjections like "umm" or "ah" or "oh," even though that's how people really speak. Too many of these make the dialogue seem jumpy to readers and (paradoxically) unnatural. And you should also aim to avoid showing greetings or partings in dialogue. You can skip the pleasantries entirely by starting the scene in the middle, or alternatively you can even use a little bit of "telling" by writing: "After the pleasantries, we..." To avoid the goodbye's, you might simply cut the scene at a key point in the dialogue, long before the characters have parted company. Scene endings, especially chapter endings, often benefit from dissonance or mic drop endings.
8. Your character has five senses. Most writers tend to focus on the visual, with lots of looking, staring, watching of beautiful sunrises, glinting windows, and so on. This isn't bad writing, but your story will be much richer if you mention the POV character's other experiences: sounds, smells, tastes, textures. If your character meets their hero in a museum, you have to inevitably mention the great painted murals, but also add more focus on the hum of the crowds, the dank smell of the air, the taste of the meal in the canteen, and the texture of the artwork when your POV character runs her fingers along the above-mentioned murals (and thereby gets chased out of the building by security guards).
9. Your character has six senses. No, I don't mean paranormal things like premonitions, although that can be a good idea, too, in some genres. What I mean is that there are indeed other "senses" that our body has that we often forget to write about. Our sense of balance and dizziness. The feeling of nausea. The pounding of the heart. The knot in the stomach from fear or excitement. That strange feeling of warning in the gut. There are many other experiences that our human body offers us, which your character can experience.
10. Immersive settings. You need an intricate setting for an immersive novel. It can be a real place, in which case you have to research it well. Or it can be a fictional place, in which case you should learn about "world building." Settings are especially important in some genres, such as romance or sci-fi. The art of a great setting is to have it be believable, and plausibly realistic enough to draw the reader in. But you also don't want to spend lots of paragraphs describing it, but instead you need to gradually have the POV character walk through the setting, and describe it as she goes.
11. Beats. If you are doing "show not tell" properly, then you'll have lots of dialogue in your scenes. This is much more immersive than telling. And to make it richer, add the beats. There are many types of beats, and you need to add them all: body language beats (scratching their nose or shifting uneasily in their seat), setting beats (gazing at the amazing view or the sound of a bell in the distance), prop interaction beats (picking up a fork or switching hands on the steering wheel), and emotional reaction beats (of the POV character's feelings, not any other character's).

There's much more to Immersive Writing than this short list. You might also want to read about Immersive Writing Mistakes.