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I've been working my way through the inimitable Miss Snark's archives. Among the many useful things she's said was that writers should look out for "somehow" in narration, as it's almost always a clue that you're cutting corners or leaving something out. When a character knows something "somehow," you are more than likely cheating just a little.
I ran a search for "somehow" in both my big WsIP and was amazed at how accurate that turned out to be. I found more than a dozen instances of "somehow," and only two of those could justify their existence: one in dialogue, and one where it really meant "the POV character doesn't know how this happened." The rest meant either "darkluna is not getting to where she wants to be using logic and thinks throwing 'somehow' at it will make up for the lapse" or "darkluna was being wishy-washy." Most can be deleted and will never be missed.
The good news for me is that a couple of handfuls of "somehow" in 75000 words is a lot better than I thought it would be. I was afraid my writing was positively riddled with it.
I ran a search for "somehow" in both my big WsIP and was amazed at how accurate that turned out to be. I found more than a dozen instances of "somehow," and only two of those could justify their existence: one in dialogue, and one where it really meant "the POV character doesn't know how this happened." The rest meant either "darkluna is not getting to where she wants to be using logic and thinks throwing 'somehow' at it will make up for the lapse" or "darkluna was being wishy-washy." Most can be deleted and will never be missed.
The good news for me is that a couple of handfuls of "somehow" in 75000 words is a lot better than I thought it would be. I was afraid my writing was positively riddled with it.
