"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]

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.