Artful Rule-Bending
The best writers bend 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 have found that it is copywork that best drills rules into your mind.
And rules matter, for all processes, whether formal or creative. Because the rules serve as an underlying skeleton, holding the ideas together.
If you have not intuited the rules, 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.
So copywork it is.