Why I've given up rhyming

When I first started writing for children, I LOVED coming up with playful tales in rhyming couplets. It was too much fun. Because rhyming lends itself well to humour and it often takes a story in unexpected directions.

The challenge was that, although it was fun to write rhyming picture books, it was incredibly difficult to do it really well. Because what sounds like a good rhyme in your own head doesn’t necessarily translate to a good rhyme when other people read it out loud. And that’s exactly what picture books are developed for - for reading out loud to young children.

Noone likes to stumble on words when they’re reading out loud.

So you have to get the meter absolutely flawless, which means taking time to evaluate every single stressed and unstressed syllable throughout the entire manuscript and labouring over all the details to create a consistent pattern from start to finish.

Now that’s some tedious and hard work!

Furthermore, many publishers aren’t even interested in accepting rhyming manuscripts. For all the reasons outlined above and more. It takes more work to edit them and it’s more difficult to translate them for international sales. So forget about it. Publishers prefer plain old prose, please and thank you.

Because I loved reading and writing rhyming picture books for a long time, I was hesitant to adjust my approach. It just didn’t excite me.

What I discovered was that it just takes time to find your own voice in prose. With practice, it becomes fun to develop lyrical text and to play around with character and dialogue.

I’m not saying I’ll never develop a rhyming manuscript again. But for now, I’m focusing on prose and I’m still having a lot of fun with it.