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Ernest Hemingway masterfully employed this technique throughout his work. In 'A Farewell to Arms,' when Catherine Barkley dies, Frederic Henry's reaction is notably restrained in the immediate aftermath. He walks back to the hotel in the rain, and the reader feels the weight of what he hasn't expressed. The emotion is all the more devastating for being held back.

Gabriel García Márquez uses delayed reaction in 'Love in the Time of Cholera' when Fermina Daza smells her husband's cologne after his death and only then fully confronts her loss—weeks after the funeral. The mundane sensory trigger makes the grief feel utterly real.

Practical exercise: Take a scene you've written where a character reacts immediately to news. Rewrite it with a 'buffer period' of ordinary activity. Notice how the tension shifts and the eventual emotional moment gains weight.

The Echo Technique transforms simple callback references into windows of psychological revelation. In Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment,' Raskolnikov repeatedly distorts his conversations with Porfiry in his own mind, each misremembering revealing his paranoia and guilt more clearly than any internal monologue could.

The key is calibration. Too obvious a distortion breaks believability; too subtle and readers miss it entirely. Aim for the emotional truth of how the character heard the words. A mother who heard 'I need space' as 'I don't love you anymore' reveals her deepest fear.

Advanced application: let the reader witness the original conversation, then encounter the distorted echo chapters later. This builds trust with your reader as a co-conspirator who understands the characters better than they understand themselves.