Well, I’m back on a Thursday, for this week at least! Hopefully I’ll be able to do at least one of these posts a month going forward, now I’m getting to grips with my new life timetable 🙂
This one really is a thought, and one I wonder if anyone shares or if I’m just an old-fashioned girl… At my last writing group, one of the other writers was talking about tools they use. One of these is a website for rhyming words, which they use for poems, and they advised us all to use the site when working on our own pieces.
I have spent a lot of time thinking about this advice and I am not entirely sure I am comfortable with it.
For me, part of writing is about seeking out a word that says something to me. Every word in my poems is fought over, and wrestled with, until I get a line or stanza that has the emotion, rhythm, and physical feel in the mouth that I am after. The work has to look right on paper as well – spiky letters or round, long words or short, repeated letters. All of it is part of the work, and I can’t imagine just picking a word that rhymes is nearly as effective. In fact, only about 30% of my work has a formal rhyme scheme because often I can’t have the poem I want within the confines of a set scheme.
Don’t get me wrong; if I was massively stuck with something I might use it to prise some ideas loose, but it wouldn’t be a shortcut, it would be a jump-start.
Writers of the past – Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Auden, Owen to name but a few – didn’t have these tools, and they managed to produce poetry that has long outlived them and still has power and resonance today.
So what do you think? Should we writers use every opportunity to make life a little easier? After all, a writing life can be pretty draining.
Or should we delve into ourselves to find words, sweat over them when needed, to make sure they fit the poem in every possible way?
I’d love to know what you think – post a comment below and let me know if you are like me or if I should get myself into the 21st Century already!!
Happy writing,
EJ
🙂
Becoming a writer 
I admire people who can execute a rhyme scheme perfectly; I couldn’t do it to save my life. But poetry is so much more than just rhymes. To write a beautiful poem there are a lot of other things that have to come together as well.
That being said, I don’t think it’s wrong to use whatever tools you have available to you. Just don’t think they will automatically do the work for you.
Yes, that’s the point for me – just picking a word because it rhymes isn’t the answer. The way the site was described was basically that it would do the work for me and I can’t see that creating anything with texture.
That’s not to say it isn’t useful, and wouldn’t work in some circumstances. All of us have tools and techniques that we utilise and it’s good to know the resource is there if it’s needed.