You know what’s awesome about novels? You can just write, “They had sex, and it was awesome” Or “then they fought with swords, and the bad guy died.” Or “Three weeks later, he’d climbed down from the mountain.”

In fact, you can even skip MUCH longer or more uncertain processes. You can write, “He was rescued by a kindly shepherdess, and by next fall they were married.” Just that line. There’s absolutely no problem with that. People will often talk about things in a story being “earned” or “unearned.” But what that refers to is emotional effects. You shouldn’t be trying to make your audience feel shit unless you’ve set it up appropriately. Like if in your next sentence, the shepherdess gets killed by the bad guy and sends your dude on a killing spree, then that’s sort of dumb. But you can absolutely skip or summarize things if you want! It’s soooo easy.

It took me a long time to realize I could do this within a scene. I didn’t need to write “Hello!” / “Hello!” I could write “they exchanged greetings.” Later on, you can expand and contract the amount of detail in the narration even without shifting focus from the interaction of these two characters. It’s pretty cool, and there’s no real analogue in film or TV, because in fiction it happens so deftly and subtly, whereas in visual media it needs to be accomplished with slow fades and quick cuts and other intrusive crap that nowadays is anyway not really in fashion.

After I took this to heart, all kinds of scenes became much easier to write, because I didn’t need to write the entire thing: I could focus entirely on the thing about the scene that actually interested me.