*Curtsies* Okay. I think part of your problem is you’re looking at it the wrong way. You really shouldn’t ever have a reason to write a scene where things “are just normally going on.” Unless something happens in a scene to change the state of play and move the story forward, it shouldn’t be there. But that doesn’t mean that every scene has to be full of big bombastic action. For instance: in my WIP there’s a scene where my narrator and her best friend have drinks at the bar. That in and of itself is pretty mundane; they do this like every other day. But on this particular day it’s significant because of the conversation they have. Best friend tells her that the nephew of the family she works for will be arriving in town in a few days’ time. Again, pretty mundane, but that event–the nephew’s arrival–is what sets the entire story in motion. I’ve crafted the entire scene around that particular piece of information, because it’s the reason the scene is there. The reader needs to know the nephew is arriving and why that matters. But this is also the first time we meet the best friend and the first time we visit the bar. So the scene is also, to a lesser extent, about introducing the reader to him and this place where they hang out. Ergo, in the course of their conversation you also get a description of the bar, the bartender, the best friend, etc. And all that stuff can happen simultaneously. But here’s the golden rule of writing: don’t waste words writing shit you don’t need. If a scene doesn’t affect the plot, cut it, and craft the scenes you do have around how they affect the plot. Aristotle actually talks about this in the Poetics, which is something every writer should read, just by the way. In section 5 he discusses structure and unity and says this: “So the structure of the various sections of the events must be such that the transposition or removal of any one section dislocates and changes the whole. If the presence or absence of something has no discernible effect, it is not part of the whole” (trans. Malcolm Heath). Ask yourself what would happen to the story if you cut this scene, and if the answer is ‘nothing,’ get rid of it. Make your words matter.
When you manage to cut your outline (and you should be outlining; outlining will make figuring out what has to happen in those tricky middle scenes much easier) down to the bare essentials, here’s what I’d suggest: Look at each scene as a tiny story. Each scene should have a beginning, middle, and end, just like a whole book does. Find the story arc of each scene. What happens? Something has to. Once you isolate what the ‘event’ of each scene is, you can figure out what needs to be said beforehand to make that event make sense, and what needs to be said afterward to indicate how that event has changed the story. Then, move on. Don’t dawdle. Next scene. More here.