"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

[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.