Notes on Time Management from Janet Burroway's  WRITING FICTION

Summary:  useful and often necessary device:  to give information, fill in a character’s background, prepare for a scene, create a transition, leap forward moments or years.

Sequential Summary:  Relates events in their sequence but compresses them:

“When I was fourteen, we moved to Maryland.  At fifteen, we moved back to Nebraska.  At sixteen, we moved again;  this time back east, to Virginia.”

Circumstantial Summary:  Describes the general circumstances during a period of time—not necessarily what happened, specifically, but the kinds of things that happened, the kinds of things that a character or characters said.  This doesn’t require an exact transcription of an event, but is told with an understanding of the way memory works.  Circumstantial summary often has the feel of scene, but allows for compression of a much greater period of time. 

“In summer, we would bike the mile to the pool in the mornings, crossing Sheridan Boulevard, then dallying, looking up at the tall leafy trees in front of the houses that were three and four times the size of our house.”

Scene:  Scene is to time what concrete detail is to the senses;  it is the crucial means of allowing your reader to experience the story. 

Bill Roorbach from Writing Life Stories   Scene is at the heart of all dramatic writing…  A good scene replaces pages and pages of explaining, expositional excess, of telling… Exposition is good at giving the facts (“I had a serious girlfriend named Linda for a year in high school back in Connecticut.”), but emotion, when presented as a fact, dies on the page.  When presented as a scene, emotion fills the readers heart and head as well. 

John Gardner from The Art of Fiction   …whatever the genre may be, fiction does its work by creating a dream in the reader’s mind… if the dream is to be powerful, it must be vivid and continuous—vivid because if we are not quite clear about what we are dreaming…our emotions and judgments will be confused; and continuous because a repeatedly interrupted flow of action must necessarily have less force than an action directly carried from its beginning to its conclusion.

Jerome Stern   Like a child in a tantrum, when you want everyone’s full attention, you “make a scene.”