Can i write a poetic book rhyming on every statement?

Question

How can i write a poetic book rhyming on every sentence, without making it boring. If its not possible then how can i work around the idea?

Answer 1

There are plenty of examples of books that are written entirely in rhyme, and the fact of it being written in rhyme will not make it boring - UNLESS you hack the story and words around so badly in order to make it rhyme that you ruin it.

I would recommend reading this:

• Love, dishonour, marry, die. Cherish, perish, a novel by (pause here for effect) David Rackoff

To see it done with epic mastery in a modern way.

However, constraining yourself to writing in rhyme is quite a serious bind, and unless you are a very experienced poet or novelist already, it may be better to attempt something a little more straightforward first, while you learn your craft.

Writing a book is hard enough as it is without adding artificial constraints.

I think it would be better to concentrate on what you want to write about - telling a good story, talking about something that matters to you - rather than having the format as your starting point.

Answer 2

A good example of a 'poetic book' is the epos. An epos is a long narrative poem originating from ancient Greece.

Epic: a long narrative poem in elevated style presenting characters of high position in adventures forming an organic whole through their relation to a central heroic figure and through their development of episodes important to the history of a nation or race. A Handbook to Literature (1999), Harmon and Holman

A famous writer of epic poems is Homerus, with the Ilias and the Odyssee as his well known works.

However, an epic poem doesn't necessarily rhyme. It mostly has some kind of rhythm, because that made it easier for people to remember it and reproduce it by word of mouth.

If you want to write a complete book that rhymes, I don't think 'boring' is the thing you should worry about. It would rather get tedious and very tiresome to read. So you should really work out what kind of rhyme you want to use. I would advise against using rhyme schemes like couplet, triplet, clerihew, limerick, and other schemes that use a lot of rhyme endings close to each other. (a list of rhyme schemes can be found here)

You can also refrain from using end rhyme (I assumed this is the kind of rhyme you meant) and use a lot more consonance, and specifically alliteration and assonance. They give your story a feeling of rhyme without it getting tedious too fast.

From their corresponding Wikipedia pages:

Consonance

Consonance is a stylistic literary device identified by the repetition of identical or similar consonants in neighbouring words whose vowel sounds are different (e.g. coming home, hot foot).

Alliteration

Alliteration is a figure of speech a which is stylistic literary device identified by the repeated sound of the first letter or second in a series of multiple words, or the repetition of the same letter sounds in stressed syllables of a phrase (e.g. big blue birds).

Assonance

Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds to create internal rhyming within phrases or sentences (e.g. Men sell the wedding bells).

Answer 3

If it were me, I'd write a great story, then set it in verse. The "boring" part isn't going to be the rhymes; if it's boring it's probably because the story is boring.