Most of us don't spend a whole lot of time rhyming in other forms of writing or speaking.
After exploring the different varieties and practicing each week, rhyming will come easier and feel a bit more natural.
By the time you’re at this exercise you should have quite a few different song starters piling up in the back of the book to choose from. Choose from one of those and go to town. It’s up to you how deep you’d like to take it. It can be the quick win after a long day, or a more involved study where you take the couplet you’ve created and expand it into a full verse (or an entire song!).
Note: With each exercise, I encourage you to differ the amount of energy you give each one every week so you’re not burning yourself out.
For a while I was trying to come up with rhymes from my own head thinking that it was somehow more 'authentic.' In reality, it was more like not using a calculator in math class. Slow, tedious, and incredibly limiting. The tools are there for a reason, utilize them. Here's a few of my favorite rhyming tools (not affiliated other than I personally use them):
ANALOG:
Clement Wood's The Complete Rhyming Dictionary - ($8ish)
Once you take a second to figure out what the heck is going on in this book and how to use it, I found it to be one of the best resources for finding unique rhymes. For me there's just something about flipping through physical pages that feels so much more connected to the process than typing on a keyboard. I like to get my workbook, this dictionary, and my big 'ol unabridged copy of Roget's International Thesaurus and spend an hour bouncing ideas between the books.
DIGITAL:
Rhyme Genie - ($24 desktop, $8 iOS)
This is available on desktop (mac & PC) as well as a mobile app on the Apple store. While it doesn't look like they're working on an Android version any time soon (sorry), I've found this to be a great desktop application to have open while writing. Like Clement's book, it takes a second to get used to, but once you figure out what all the buttons do and see all the different rhyme types and filters, it becomes an indispensable tool in your arsenal.
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