If you have a character stand up and put on her shoes and open the door, in order to do that, you're imagining her shoes and her clothes and her house and her door. The character becomes more real. But once you've done that, you can probably just get it all across with a couple of details.
We have to give our poor, innocent, and undeserving-of-our-badness characters trouble in order to make them characters in a story.
I think that inevitably, the trouble our characters go through is a kind of metaphor for what's happening in ourselves.
