The external world must be rendered exactly. This person could have written in the extended time stretch. This exercise helps you to learn to recognize important points in your work and emphasize them. It helps you to include readers in an experience by using specific facts and details, by relying on the five senses, especially sight. It should show you the benefit of observing and recording accurately, which is that you will remember even more and often discover insights.
Writers can compress weeks or years of time into a paragraph.
To capture the essence of a period of time and render it specifically and dramatically so as to include readers, writers must first establish a time frame. Writers need to communicate their dominant attitude towards the period of time. Then they write, using outstanding evidence to reveal the nature of that time period. Trying to stay awake during the long drive through the unlit backroads of North Augusta and Richmond County was a whole new kind of hell. Every time I drifted to sleep, a punch would dig hard into my biceps . . . .