Hi, just wondered what y'all thought about rhymes in fiction. Have been finding that it is becoming a regular thing in my writing, almost a part of style, but don't want to overdo it, or use it inappropriately. I try to limit it to no more than twice in a chapter. For example, chapter I've just written contains this sentence early on: 'She turned the corner and disappeared from sight, the sound of the horse’s hooves fading in the night.' Then the last sentence of the chapter is: 'Tom stepped inside the front door, closing it behind him. Then slithering from nowhere – from nowhere at all - Joe Cooper’s malevolent snigger hissed around the hall.' Too much in your opinion? Or effective? There aren't any other obvious rhymes in the chapter. Thanks.
My opinion is that - embedded within prose - it feels very young, like it's meant to appeal to a rather young reader. Think about children's books and how there comes a lower age threshold where the line between prose and poetry grows soft, wide, and fuzzy. Rhymes are engaging for children and easy to remember, so it's often a part of the prose that we aim at them as readers. Just my 2p, but that's what it feels like to me.
I think it's distracting. Rhymes are a hiccup in prose, mainly because prose already has a rhythm. When you smash two rhythms together it's like trying to listen to two songs at once. Also consider the fact that the rhyming prose will stand out more than the idea its trying to communicate, which is typically a very bad thing. They are darlings. In this case IMO the first one can be overlooked, but the second should die. Write some poems to get it out of your system.
There's an expectation too of the form following on, it'd appear poetry's being broken into, then broken off. A misfiring engine? I figure you could indulge yourself/get away with it if you made it the trait (the speech) of a side character; an aspirant poet taking every opportunity to practise maybe (tread carefully). < I've seen this method applied in stories with characters whose primary relevance seems to be to add levity/subtexts of the author/innuendo. Then there's the other route (I'll wink here dear and you can think on this) you can secretly play, ergo indulge such an indulgance (too obvious), with assonance and consonance. That is not so much have your word choices overtly rhyme, but covertly run and be threaded with a rhythm.
It reminds me that there is an author and in almost all circumstances that is a no-no IMO - sorry. I think elements of poetry can work in prose but not rhyme, it draws attention to itself and that can only detract from the story.
Exact rhymes, especially when they end lines, are very noticeable and can be dangerous because they point to the structure in a way that's very deliberate and overly clever. It's usually the kind of thing you edit out, not in. (Unless you're writing for kids.) If you're going to use rhymes, it will probably happen within the sentence. You get internal rhymes all the time. You can use them to bind phrases. But if we're talking about line endings, because that's where simple rhyming likes to live, I've done deliberate weak ending rhymes before. I've fit sentences into meter too. That elevates the sentence. Heightened prose, I guess you'd call it. It's all about timing. It needs a deliberate reason for being there, just like any literary device. I've never had a publisher edit those out.
