There’s a moment in every memoir where time has to bend.

I think about this when I read a passage that rushes through years in a paragraph, and I think about it again when I land in a single afternoon that takes up ten pages. Both speeds matter, but most memoirists know they should use more scene. The question is when.

Michele Sharpe says it well: the difference is time. Summaries compress time to deliver necessary information, while scenes take place in a dimension approximating real time.¹Sharpe, M.J., 2021. Writing Memoir: Scene & Summary. https://michelejsharpe.medium.com/writing-memoir-scene-summary-10532566c1f I’ve been thinking about this a lot because it gets at a core tension in memoir: you cannot write your whole life down. You have to choose. Choose what deserves to unfold in real time and what can be compressed.

For me, summaries are easier to write than scenes. I find this interesting and honest. Summaries feel like getting the work done, like we’re ticking boxes, reporting what happened, what we learned, what we realised along the way. But as Sharpe notes, they won’t carry a story. They don’t give the reader that sense of immersion that most readers crave. And immersion is the thing, isn’t it? That’s why people read memoir in the first place, to feel something, to be somewhere, to live inside a moment that isn’t theirs. A good summary can keep the plot moving, can orient us to when and where and what, but it can’t make us hold our breath.

That’s why when you slow down for the important moments, it lands. When you slow down, you’re telling the reader: this matters. Pay attention. Someone on Reddit put it simply: when you use scene, you are telling the reader that this part is important.²Reddit r/writing, 2023. Scene vs Summary Discussion. https://www.reddit.com/r/writing/ It’s a signal. It costs you nothing to write a summary, but a scene demands you actually go there. It asks you to remember not just what happened, but what it felt like. What you saw. What you heard. What the light was doing.

But this doesn’t mean every moment should be a scene. That would be exhausting, and you’d lose the thread entirely. Scenes help us skip over time that isn’t relevant to the story, and they transport us from one scene to the next. That’s their job too, creating space so the important stuff has room to breathe. The summary is the connective tissue. It’s what gets us from the moment that mattered to the moment that’s about to matter. It’s the railway tracks that take you from station to station. Without it, you’d have nothing but a series of isolated moments, beautiful but unconnected.

I think the question becomes: what is important? That’s the hard part, and every memoirist answers it differently. But for me, the answer usually involves emotion. When something shifts, when a feeling changes, when you become someone different in that moment, that’s when to use scene. It’s the difference between saying “I learned to be more patient with my father over the following months” and actually being in a room with him, the silence stretching, the thing unsaid hanging between you, his hands wrapped around a cup that had long gone cold. One tells. The other shows. One moves us through time. The other makes us stay.

There’s another way to think about it too. Summary is the view from above, from a great height, seeing the whole landscape at once. Scene is the view from inside, from down in the grass, up close with the details. Both are valid. Both are necessary. But if you stay at that great height for too long, the reader starts to feel untethered. They forget who you were, what you wanted, why any of it mattered. You have to come back down to earth every now and then. You have to let them stand beside you.

Scenes don’t come naturally to me either. I have to force myself to slow down and write, as best I can, in a moment-by-moment way, but only when I’m at a particularly dramatic or emotional point in the story.³Sharpe, M.J., 2021. Writing Memoir: Scene & Summary. https://michelejsharpe.medium.com/writing-memoir-scene-summary-10532566c1f It feels like extra work, and it is. There’s a reason we gravitate toward summary. It’s efficient. It gets the job done. You can summarise a year in a sentence, but a scene takes paragraphs, sometimes pages, to capture what happened in a single afternoon. But summary might get you there, whereas scene lets you stay.

So here’s what I keep coming back to: if you can feel the emotion heating up in your memory, or when something is changing, when you’re about to tell the reader this is where things shifted, this is where I became someone new, this is the moment I still think about at 3am — slow down. Give yourself and the reader the gift of actually being there, in that moment, together. Let them feel the floor beneath your feet, hear the words that were said, see the light through the window in the late afternoon, the dust floating in the beam. Let them be there with you.

For the rest, you can speed up. No one needs to live through every Tuesday of your life. But the Tuesdays that changed you, the afternoons that split you into before and after, the conversations you still replay — those deserve to be witnessed. Those are worth the slow down.

• 1
  Sharpe, M.J., 2021. Writing Memoir: Scene & Summary. https://michelejsharpe.medium.com/writing-memoir-scene-summary-10532566c1f
• 2
  Reddit r/writing, 2023. Scene vs Summary Discussion. https://www.reddit.com/r/writing/
• 3
  Sharpe, M.J., 2021. Writing Memoir: Scene & Summary. https://michelejsharpe.medium.com/writing-memoir-scene-summary-10532566c1f