Artful Rule-Bending
The master bends rules, intently, once he knows them.
It is an old observation that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric. When they do so, however, the reader will usually find in the sentence some compensating merit, attained at the cost of the violation. Unless he is certain of doing as well, he will probably do best to follow the rules. After he has learned, by their guidance, to write plain English adequate for everyday uses, let him look, for the secrets of style, to the study of the masters of literature.
I like doing copywork. It drills the rules into your mind.
And knowing your rules matters:
Rules apply to all processes/domains - whether formal or creative.
Rules serve as the underlying skeleton that holds ideas together.
Beginners often think freedom means discarding structure. But that usually leads to work that feels directionless. If you have not intuited the rules of a particular domain, your artistic hand has no sense of the underlying creative force that guides it.
Thus whatever takes form will often lack aim, and turn out stilted, or ugly.
The paradox then: that true creativity requires mastery of constraints.
So more copywork, it is.