Alright, now we've reached the fun part. How do we actually say something? Given a word (your rhyme), say a sentence ending in that word. It’s surprisingly tricky - can’t blow your load too early but also can’t accidentally say too many words before the rhyming word arrives. The goal is still to land your rhyme on four. You also want the sentence to be “good”; sensible English, with some meaning.
Example:
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My first line was: “I drive a nice car, check out my ride”.
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I already know that my rhyme is going to be “lied” because it's in a rhyme set.
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I come up with: “If someone says I suck then they must have lied”.
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There are a couple tricks that can help you do this. The first are generic lead ins.
There are some phrases that leave their endings wide open - you can plug in a wide variety of words or phrases and have them make some semblance of sense.
E.g. “On the mic you know I’m _________”
lit
fire
dope
awesome
Simply construct and memorize a few of these, and fall back on them if you can’t think of anything better. Also, if you are too slow on thinking of a rhyme, you can just start on one of these and hope for the best. A lot of freestyling is trusting yourself, and hoping for the best so get used to this feeling.
The second trick you can use are memorized phrases. When you are writing the rhymes in your rhyme sets, also write down short phrases that will help you use them more easily. Then when memorizing your rhyme sets, just memorize the phrase too. For more variety, think of the different ways they could be used.
E.g. “money I’m tryna gain”, “in the gym I get gains”, “check the microphone’s gain” are all ways of using the rhyme “gain”
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But once again, these are just tricks in case you get stuck. In the long run, you don’t want to rely too heavily on generic lead ins or memorized phrases because you'll sound repetitive and people will pick up on it. However, definitely practice them hard right now so that you can get off of the ground. Also, even in the long run, it’s hard to have good sentence construction 100% of the time so having these tricks lets you fill in the gaps.
"Okay, so what's the best way to make sentences then?" Imaginary student, you're always the perfect segue. The best way to construct sentences is what's called building forwards and backwards (Yes, we made this term up so don't bother trying to Google it).
When you're about to start on a bar, and you know what the rhyme at the end is going to be start saying words that you think will be able to eventually connect to the rhyme (building forwards). Start from the rhyme, and begin thinking of words that could lead into it (building backwards). When the forwards & backwards phrases connect, you have completed the line.
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"Well that's just great and all but that sounds hard". Yes, it is hard but very achievable. The goal is to be able to disconnect your mouth from your brain. Essentially, you need to drill this until it becomes automatic so that while you're spitting your first bar, your brain can be thinking about your second, third or fourth bar. This will likely take hours of practice but it is a skill you will constantly be working on to perfect so don't sweat if you're not great all the time. On the bright side, once you can do this, you are officially freestyling! Maybe you're not the best but its freestyle nonetheless.
There are a couple ways you can practice. The first is to replace saying "KICK-SNARE-KICK" (or nothing if you haven't been saying it) with "Blah blah blah blah blah". Slowly start to replace the blahs with real words, even if they don't make sense. Once you have mostly words, try making each bar as coherent as possible. After some practice, you'll notice your brain wants to make sense, and does a lot of the work for you.
Another way that might work is to practice building forwards, and backwards separately then trying them together. You'll notice that connecting the two phrases will be the hardest part but you'll develop a knack for it.
With either option, once you can make coherent lines 7/10 times, you can move onto the next lesson. You'll also want to create, and memorize an additional 10 rhyme sets. Be sure to include slants and multis! Check out some tips on how to drill rhyme sets.