I was thinking about who I learn from, or not, and why. I know people who are relatively successful in various creative endeavors, and yet I don't learn anything useful from them, or at least don't want to, and I decided it came down to the kind of work they were doing, not the relative degree of success in the marketplace.

Thing is, there aren't a lot of rules in creative fields, the way there might be in medicine or engineering. But there are some, and a lot of people follow them blindly. "Avoid clichés," writers say, or "Don't use the passive voice." But see, here's the thing: Rules were made to be broken. Sometimes you want the object of the action as the subject of the sentence, and that's when passive is useful. And if you've heard a phrase before, maybe it's because that's the pithiest way to state the idea.

So following the rules is fine up to a point, but if you lean on it too much your work can become plodding, formulaic, and earthbound. That doesn't mean it will fail in the marketplace. Bricklayers work in a plodding, step-by-step manner, and they make good, useful things. Certain highly successful artists, writers, musicians and so forth do essentially the same thing, and good for them.

But merely following rules and patterns is a little too easy, isn't it? Do this, do this, do that, you're done. You're laying bricks all day, every day. I was thinking about that, and then I was thinking about other creative people whose work I like better, and I decided their work was based less on rules than on inspiration.

And I remembered those summer nights when we were kids and we would get those long, thin boxes of sparklers and light them up. They would make this blazing star of fizzing white light, and I guess every kid who ever ran around with sparklers at a twilight barbecue discovered that if you waved it through the air, it would leave a trail on your retinas that would hang there in the darkness for a second or so. And that's how it works when it's right, in my own humble opinion—you get inspired by something, and you want to express it out artistically. And if it goes right, what you do, your words, notes, paint, whatever, leaves a lingering glow in other people's minds that cuts through the meaningless murk of daily life and hangs there like the Northern Lights.

We had a couple of pretty good snowstorms recently where I live, and I thought of the "Winter" concerto from Vivald's The Four Seasons. I don't know much about Vivaldi and whether he preferred to follow the rules or to break them. I only know that I thought about that piece while the snow was howling relentlessly down on us, because the music sounds like winter. The fierceness of the storms, and the lovely, still purity afterward. I don't think Antonio V. thought too much about whether he was in line with the commonly accepted best practices and techniques in Baroque composition while he was writing this. I think he mostly sat down and had a long think about what winter would sound like if it were music. And he finally got a pretty good sense of where to go, and then he dipped the quill pen in the inkwell and started writing. Three centuries later, people still play it and listen to it, because it still sounds like winter. Is there a rule to be found in that? Because if there is, it might be one of the ones worth following.