"somehow"

[truepenny]

"Somehow" is the weaseliest of weasel words.

The Turkey City Lexicon categorizes it under Fuzz: An element of motivation the author was too lazy to supply. The word "somehow" is a useful tip-off to fuzzy areas of a story. "Somehow she had forgotten to bring her gun."

And it isn't necessarily just motivations that "somehow" can be substituted for. It can also stand in for feats the author doesn't know how the character could have pulled off: "Somehow Superman freed himself from the kryptonite handcuffs." Or for secondary characters and antagonists doing three-quarters of the author's work for them while conveniently off-stage: "Somehow the Balrog had heard about Gandalf's weakness for chocolate liqueurs." And so on.

Moreover, "somehow" isn't limited to fiction. The book I'm currently reading, Angus Fletcher's Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Cornell UP, 1964), has this shining example in the middle of Fletcher's trying to explain why he can claim genre fiction (mysteries, westerns, and science fiction) as allegorical without having to do all the tiresome, degrading work of, you know, proving it: "But somehow the literal surface suggests a peculiar doubleness of intention" (7). "Somehow" here translates to "because I said so."

Which is its real meaning in fiction as well.

Comments

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I disagree, I think; at least in third limited, "somehow" seems to me to have a legitimate use to communicate the viewpoint character not getting what just happened. Blurring at the "somehow" level between author and reader, I agree with you on, but not as a POV issue.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

This is exact, but let's be positive here; sometimes it's a useful diagnostic tool, rather than a fault. If you find you used the word in an early draft, or even if you're at the keyboard and feel yourself being pulled actively towards the word, it's a safe sign that your thinking is still fuzzy on this point of plot or motivation or whatever. It's only reprehensible when it gets into print (as in your final example above, which is (a) shocking and (b) all too common).

But really I just wanted to say thanks for pointing me at the Turkey City Lexicon, which I hadn't come across before...

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

your thinking is still fuzzy on this point of plot or motivation or whatever.

But what if you are perfectly clear on it, and your viewpoint character isn't, and you are perfectly clear on needing to communicate that ?

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Mmm, it's a nice point. In a perfect coded system, there would of course be a way exactly to signify that you-the-writer were clear about what s/he-the-character is utterly unclear about. But language is fuzzy at its point of origin, which is us, and fuzzier at its point of arrival, which is the reader; we're all Humpty-Dumpty, we use words to mean what we want them to mean, and cannot guarantee that they will carry that meaning over the gulf. The best we can hope for is a close approximation (as witness this debate, where you and I would read the same word with at least the risk of utterly different reactions to it); which being true, it has to be wiser to avoid words that are fuzzy at the outset. Doesn't it?

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Your point makes sense, but I do not like it, and I'm not sure I'm willing to give up on doing the tricky solution well enough to work rather than going for the simpler solution, just yet.

I get the feeling I'm quite a ways out from the norm in terms of considering POV integrity as taking precedence over pretty much everything, and in the extent to which there's no such thing as a reliable narrator is a fundamental part of my reading experience and something I forget other readers may not do.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

I sign in with rysmiel in this one: I don't think the word itself is *always* a symptom of fuzzy thinking on the writer's part. Sometimes, it is a useful indication of a character's failure to understand what just happened.

"Somehow, he found himself on his ass at the bottom of the stairs."

*g*

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Oh, granted - but that's for effect, and generally the ironical use noted below by cavlee. Where it speaks directly to fuzziness-of-character, and can be identified as doing so, that's fine; but that's usually reserved to lightly comic effect. As witness your *g*. It's not safe otherwise. Laugh, and the world laughs with you, mostly because you are pointing a finger and going ho-ho-ho. Beyond that - well, I wholeheartedly support rysmiel's intention to make the tricky stuff work, I just worry about that percentage of readers who will miss the point and get lost, or left behind, or simply walk away.

[xjenavivex.livejournal.com]

my son would say that goes with maybe and "we'll see"

[libskrat]

There's also an ironical, responsibility-deflecting use of "somehow" that I like to read. "Gee, somehow this highly useful frannistan just happens to be in my pocket rather than yours!" "Gee, somehow I'm all over moss-troll ichor!" When everybody knows how it happened but nobody wants to say it.

Spanish has a weird semi-passive se construction ("se me olvidó la bolsa") that gets this and similar notions across marvelously, but English doesn't really have a matching syntax. The closest we get is the weasel-worded "mistakes were made," but the Spanish construction doesn't have quite the weasel-wordy connotation.

[veejane.livejournal.com]

In the modern era, we do not need "somehow" at all. We have the underpants gnomes (cf. South Park) instead. In addition to delivering clean underpants to your underwear drawer, they will discover new laws of physics, derive exciting magical problem-solving incantations, and help a hero who has had the everliving crap beaten out of him stand up and run miles without vomiting.

They're amazingly useful.

[aranel.livejournal.com]

When I use "somehow" in criticism, I tend to use it as a signpost for "hm, this is puzzling, let's look closer at it, shall we?" I think it's only a problem when the critic stops at "somehow author does x" and doesn't proceed from "author seems to me to be doing x" to "let's try to figure out how."

[jim0052.livejournal.com]

Sometimes, though, it works. Somehow. :-)

=====

There's a place for us,
A time and place for us.
Hold my hand and we're halfway there.
Hold my hand and I'll take you there.
Somehow,
Some day,
Somewhere!

[hominysnark.livejournal.com]

*loffs Jim with much loff*

[jim0052.livejournal.com]

Thank you. That's so sweet, somehow.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Mm, but romantic hope is fuzzy by nature. And generally, as in this example, incorrect...

[desperance.livejournal.com]

...which of course Sondheim knows, and he's doing it deliberately, which I think fits in smartly with rysmiel's point above...

[desperance.livejournal.com]

...and matociquala's...

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

and then of course there is the additional problem of writing epiphanies. :-P

Because, sometimes, you just know something.

Somehow.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Ah, gah. I'm not having that, it's delusional. If you're writing a delusional character, fine, again it falls into the POV/ironic state discussed above - but it had better not turn out to be true. It's like dreams: count the number of dreams that mean something in real life, against the number of dreams that mean something in fiction, and the disproportion tells you all you need to know. Epiphanies are just the same; they're writerly cop-outs, the epitome of fuzziness.

If your character knows something, and they're right, then there is a 'how', whether they know it or not - and the writer had damn' well better know how, and the reader had damn' well better learn it, because 'epiphany' on its own simply will not do.

Rant over. Dear me, I seem to have punchable buttons...

[seajules]

Not necessarily delusional, just not self-reflective. Of course, in those cases, I generally expect the narration to have supplied enough information that the reader knows how the character arrived at the epiphany, even if the character's not inclined to stop and backtrack.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Hee.

YOU are not an intuitive reasoner, apparently. As for me, about 30% of the time I figure something out, I have no idea how I got there. It's not "If a then b then c then d" for me. It's "if a and q and z and t then y."

There was an example of this in a mafia game at WisCon. *g* I knew who a bad guy was, but the only reason I could point to was "It's the way he's blinking his eyes."

Happens to me all the time.

Sorry, chum.

(Mind you, I don't do it in writing, because people have a fetish about it... but I apparently frequently do it to people with my plots. "What happened in this scene?" "Oh, isn't it intuitively obvious?"

[desperance.livejournal.com]

'Straordinary. But then, if other people weren't weird, we wouldn't need stories to explain 'em.

Even so, as you say, best left on the list of those things that may happen in real life but still won't work in fiction. Fiction's just so much better organised, bless its little cotton socks. In pairs, in the sock drawer.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

"That's not a revelation, Jim. That's an epiphany."

[ Which amuses me most because of how many people assume it's Spock to Kirk, when in fact it was Beckett to Joyce. ]

Epiphanies are damned hard, because while there is an underlying mental process, it's not something I'm used to thinking of as consciously accessible, and also because it happens so much faster than one can describe it - in terms of a set of things suddenly falling into a new pattern, for example.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Exactly. In my own writing, I've had to *learn* to make the process by which I figure out how a story works accessible to the reader. Which more or less involves going back and constructing a completely bullshit logical structure to support the things that I just *know.*

Took me twenty years to learn to do it, too, and I still blow it a lot.

Linear thinkers are weird.