Occasionally when I’ve asked writers what rhyming dictionary they use, some have been indignant, as though to say, “I do not cheat.  I am self-sufficient.”  Others have looked at me sadly, as if hoping that someday I will abandon my artificial crutch and get in touch with my creative inner self.

Use a rhyming dictionary.  This is one place where self-reliance and rugged individualism is silly.  Finding rhymes is almost never a creative act.  It is purely mechanical search.  On those few occasions where it is creative (finding mosaic rhymes, for example), a rhyming dictionary can still stimulate the creative process.

The self reliant writer who thinks  rhyming is a spontaneous expression of personal creativity can usually be seen gazing into space, lost somewhere in the alphabet song, “discovering” one-syllable words.  This “alphabet process” is certainly at least as artificial as a rhyming dictionary.  Nothing about it is creative or pure, nor is it spontaneous.  The worst part of it is its inefficiency.

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