In my experiment in self-editing, I thought about the use of the phrase "yada, yada, yada." I know it's not an acceptable literary device, except in Seinfeld books, but it is a useful tool when you don't want to write the whole story and know your listener or reader will get the gist of the missing story element.
For instance, if I write "I opened the deliciously new Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, and -- yada, yada, yada -- my room only got 75% cleaned," anyone who knows me (and most of those who don't) would understand what happened in the yada'd part of the sentence.
The key is, of course, not to use "yada, yada, yada" for too much information, or information that is not a logical segue into the ending part of the sentence. In this sentence, "I was cooking dinner and -- yada, yada, yada -- I think my toe is definitely broken," there is no logical connection between cooking dinner and breaking toes; the yadas become either comical or frustrating, depending on what other information you can glean from the rest of the writing. I'm still trying to decide which will be the case here.
Please do not comment on the fact that my experiment in self-editing has taken up four paragraphs. I am painfully aware. When one has been in the habit of writing long, detailed entries in one's journal for most of her life, writing short, descriptive yet compact stories is a problem. It is one I hope to overcome for my writing career's sake.
And the answer to the yadas in paragraph three is that Child Six pulled all the stacked glass casserole dishes out of the bottom cupboard, where they were on the second shelf, directly onto my little toe. I haven't yelled that loud since I found my nephew and my daughter standing in the kitchen surrounded by a dozen or so thrown and broken eggs. What are you gonna do, though? I taped it. It's painful but endurable.
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