cks you designed to be ~exotic~ or whatever, and those rabid jerks at Disney can only grit their teeth now!
On Zebras, and the writing for thereof. · 7:54pm Apr 25th, 2016
I am often chocked and surprised...
...With how often I hear writing Zecore is a task by many so despised.
Why, I ask? Surely tis' a challenging but fair and rewarding task?
Is it a task simply to far from the norm different? Or are they of rhyming dictionaries ignorant?
(And yes I do realize I yet to publish with her on this site, but that is due to no stories I've written fitting her outright. I am aware this may seem thus hypocritical, but I simply hope this may aid in making things for my fellow writers less difficult.)
Oh, and I wrote this in about a quarter of an hour. How even the show-staff find her supposedly impossible to write for is frankly beyond my brainpower. 
Just a small musing and a tip, I genuinely hope it may aid at least some of you in your authorship. 
And before I'm asked: Yes. I have talked with a couple of fellow authors on this site that were genuinely shocked that there exists such things as rhyming dictionaries.
I guess they're just not that common in RL anymore, since free-form prose is more common nowadays...?
Still, whatever the reason, just something that popped into my head might be worth a blog.
The big problem with Zecora isn't really writing up the rhymes. Those are easy enough that anyone can probably do it, given a few minutes to think it over, even with the constraints of actually having to say something particular with it.
The difficulty is doing it and making it sound good. Rhymes evoke poetry. Poetry is hard. Now, most people probably couldn't properly put it into words just why this is so, but there's something of a nearly instinctive recognition of a good verse in most people. It's not just rhyme, it's also meter and cadence. Songs, poems, nursery rhymes, all that kind of contributes to a general sense for what works and what doesn't. Coming up with a rhyme or two is easy enough, but writing an entire conversation in iambic pentameter, without half-rhymes or repetitions, which is kind of necessary in order to not make it sound clumsy? That's not nearly as simple.
There's a reason most authors stay far away from that and why Tolkien is generally respected even by the people who didn't like the songs and poetry in his books. In a technical sense, they are proficient. That's not easy.
A tower built of spit and spite,
Without a sound, without a sight,
The biter bit, the bitter bite,
It's better to be out at night.
It's a simple little thing and barely even a poem, but coming up with that kind of thing off the cuff takes some doing.
Dungeons and Dragons characters my friend, whose speech on rhyming did depend. Metre first and sounding second, a rule with which I would abscond.
Still it was fun as these things may be, and got my friends to yell "GET ON WITH IT" at me.
Zecora doesn't just rhyme, she also speaks with a rhythm and cadence which is even more difficult to properly account for, and most don't anyway. What's more, readers are lucky when someone manages to characterize more than one main character - or even secondary character - well enough for them to 'feel' like the character, or be read in that character's voice. Zecora is just one of the more obvious characters when the author is falling short.
It is always so sad in telling tales;
when the story is true, but the writing fails.
3895820
...Eh, I haven't heard any specific cadence myself beyond the obvious rhyming, but I'll freely admit that might be how I'm not a native English speaker rearing its head again.
She does have one heck of an odd accent, though, and speaks far more slower and carefully then the rest of the cast. That I'll admit is also often neglected.
Still, mostly wrote this because I'm a bit tired of excuses for her to not even bothering with the rhyming.
3895820
Basically my point. The difficulty is really making that whole rhythmic sing-song tone she has going work.
3895866
Miss-read and missed your first comment. Sorry about that.
Still, fair enough. Again, I don't hear any 'rhythm' to her speech myself, but I'll admit I've got a very weak ear for that sort of stuff.
My point I mentioned towards 3895860 about how few try to even get the rhyming right, and the shocking number of people I've had to explain what a rhyming dictionary is I'll still stand by, though.
3895891
No doubt. It's the internet, after all. Even if you hadn't ever heard of the paper type, the internet is chock-full of things like thesauruses and anagram generators. It would be more unexpected if there weren't such a thing. Some people can't be arsed to spend even five minutes doing basic Google searches, though. It's plain laziness.
But yeah, it's there. It's not very obvious most of the time, because it would probably get obnoxious really quickly if her every line of dialogue sounded like a poetry recital, but that general cadence is there. "Duh-duh duh-duh duh-duh duh-DUH, duh-duh duh-duh duh-duh duh-DUH." If you listen closely, you can kinda pick it out. It's not in everything, but enough so that it's a definite part of the character voice.
English poetry often has a cadence and rhythm to the telling when properly formatted in emphasis on portions of words and how they flow, rather than, for example, symbol counting as in a haiku. But then this is harder to translate into text than spoken word. Sometimes this emphasis and method of speech follows a pattern, sometimes it doesn't, but either way it gives the words a lyrical quality.
Not gonna lie. In written form Zecora works fine without the sing-song cadence and rhythm, as long as there's even a half-assed rhyme. Actual voice acted show, different story.
Yes it does help, but in prose, not necessary.
Unrelated note: I did not know how to spell rhythm until today, I had a good vocabulary before I had a computer, but spell check is an amazing tool if used correctly.
>Grumbles about the unfinished Zebra history in your joke-fic Darkness OC
Some people are determined to keep the rhythm and syllable count symmetrical, but hey.
3896571
Gonna have to disagree on that - some people (*cough*) can follow the poetics just fine while reading as well as while listening. Zecora dialogue written by people who think throwing rhymes at the page is good enough tends to be rather painful, and while I won't drop a story just for that, there've been a few cases where it pushed a teetering one over the brink.
(Sorry, Lord Of Dorkness, but the bit at the start of this blog post is... less than stellar, shall we say. I would definitely recommend doing some poetry study before attempting to write her - it's certainly possible to learn to hear the rhythms involved, and in my experience most people can more-or-less get the hang of it fairly quickly.
On the other hand, I'll admit to being one of those people who weren't aware of the existence of rhyming dictionaries. True, I don't imagine I'll likely ever need to use one, but still, good to know!)
3897191
Fair enough. My interest and education in prose is near non-existent, Honestly haven't even noticed the rhyming couplets thing until I went and checked dialogue transcripts.
Heck, I even had to go check the MLP wiki to get the right term so I could actually research it in turn.
Again, though, I'll stand by that not even getting the rhyming right is something I consider incredibly lazy.