How Can We Learn and Improve Our Writing Skills? I think I’ve moved toward more sentence fragments now, so I’m not sure she’d consider that an improvement. LOL! I’ve always been so confused as to why agents and editors don’t like rhyming books. We can agree that it’s a bit too much. This book wouldn't be possible without my lovely blog readers and your support over the years! Rhythmic writing is not limited, by any means, to literary fiction. For example, here are two paragraphs I wrote yesterday: “He opened his mouth to call them again, but no sound escaped. Just a note: I will only answer general questions about the craft of writing, agents, editors or publishing. I agree that rhyme is to delight and surprise or give you what you would not expect, but I do not agree that it is to impress, which means you are trying to show off, which can turn readers off. If much of their dialogue ends in prepositions, readers will come away with an impression that they’re weak. In addition to looking more readable, it combines the two originally differing points of emphasis into one idea while ending in the stronger sound. Okie dokie… Why is he sitting on a wall? Like in my papers, I tend to like short sentences, or I would at least use commas to break down a long sentence into more manageable chunks. I took one look at that text and never wanted to try writing rhyming picture books, because I think it’s just such an accomplished, virtuoso rhyming text. I just use them very sparingly–only when it’s the best punctuation choice for the situation. Where do they falter? At least, not in an overt way as say Ellen Hopkins (Novels in Verse), or musically inclined in the traditional sense. Those last points above are why rhythm can be a good thing for our writing. While most of our site should function with out, we recommend turning it back on for a better experience. Italics? Great point! In contrast, rhythmic writing is simply about the way the words come together—syllables, punctuation, sentence length, hard or soft sounds, etc.—to create a sense of a beat. I think that reading your rhyming children’s books aloud will be extremely illuminating to you if you’ve never even considered counting syllables. In this article on Romance University, she shares several examples from different genres and discusses many of these same techniques for what gives her examples cadence. It is too cutesy? The trick here, of course, is actually reading your work as it’s written, not reading your work with the rhythm that you want to impose on it. I love rhythm in writing and do work on it, usually in the last pass. The point of rhyming children’s books isn’t to find a word that works and wedge it in somehow, the point of rhyme is to delight, impress, and surprise.
Those are the two biggest mistakes new writers make in our group as well, ( chasing rhyme and boring rhyme). Though I tend to alternate rather than build up. We’re probably all familiar with the idea that poetry, music, and song lyrics can have rhythm. When a passage sounds particularly awkward, I mark it for later work. “They followed him faithfully, believing in his message of hope.” I can usually see the problem I heard at that point. Even if we’re not coordinated enough to dance, most of us could nod heads or tap toes to the beat for many songs. Love that too. But I think I can understand that people not used to seeing such abundant uses of semicolons might find these ; very off-putting, lol. Ooh!!!! Material created by Jane Straus and GrammarBook.com. I have to be careful of semicolons because one reader complained… — Read More », Hi Serena, Fantastic tips! Do you have more examples of rhythm in genre writing you can share? As for the narrative part, yes, I do like to control the length of the sentences so that it sounds right. Thanks for making something that seems to difficult to explain much more concrete. Yet a lot of people who choose to write in rhyme don’t seem to make that connection. Thanks for adding to the conversation with that insight! If the story falls by the wayside, you are choosing style over substance, and that’s problematic.