It took me a long time to get comfortable (didn't say competent) at rhyming. When I first started writing more-or-less (more less than more) metrical poetry I seldom took the trouble to find full rhymes, and whether or not I did, I usually hid the rhymes with violent enjambments. I was even pleased when people would read a poem and tell me admiringly that they didn't notice the rhyme at first: Auden said everyone secretly likes the smell of their own farts, and my readers and I, grad students all, clearly thought rhyming was not so different from farting. I've learned better, but I seem to have forgotten how to do slant rhyme.
That's not quite it: it feels like cheating, even though I know that's silly. I used to use rhyming dictionaries a lot, and that felt like cheating, too. Geek that I am, I still read rhyming dictionaries, but I don't use them when I'm actually working on a poem. Frost said that in well-done rhyme you can't tell which word was thought of first, and sometimes these days even I don't know — they're just there. But this last week, and especially yesterday, as I tried to rework my terza rima murder mystery drafts into slant rhyme, I found myself loading Lexical FreeNet for words that sounded like the word I wanted to pair. God. Maybe it's just practice I need.
It also felt like cat-vacuuming, a term used at the Usenet group rec.arts.sf.composition to mean any of the enormous number of unimportant things you suddenly have to do right-now when you sit down to write. It's not moving the story forward. I think the thing to do is get the practice using slant rhyme by working on the next section of the story, and the next, and the next, and save rewriting for when I have a story to rewrite.
2:07:17 PM 
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