Writing for children is a passion that many people have. How well they do it is a separate issue. Add writing in rhyme to the equation and the numbers take an even narrower path.

It is a well-discussed subject among those that are both published in the genre of children's books and those aspiring to be published, on why most publishers do not like works in rhyme. While there are surely a select number of editors who do not like rhyme for one reason or another, I would speculate to say that what the editors dislike is bad rhyme.

What is Bad Rhyme?

"How hard can it be to rhyme?" you might ask, as most of us learned the basic skills to do it early in our primary educations? Rhyming two words may not be that difficult, but when you consider the fact that, the rhyme must come secondary to the story itself, that the storyline must be the most important aspect; rhyme can start to take a more difficult curve. The words must flow in a natural fashion. If they don’t, the story will never come to fruition.

Forced Rhyme

Beginners often have a story in mind and for whatever reason drives them; they want to merge the story into rhyme. The difficulty with this is the words often become forced just to make the rhyme work. The dilemma, forced rhyme itself never works. What exactly does it mean when an editor or critique partner tells you that your rhyme is forced? "Forced" is when just to make the pattern work, a word is placed out of its natural context within a sentence, just to make it rhyme with a previous line.