Every so often I hear some writing advice that annoys me, and then I want to rant about it.

This time, I’m mad about this idea that you can get away with being weird if you’re a genius. But if you’re still just learning, you have to color inside the lines and play by the rules.

When I think of, “If you’re still just learning, you have to color inside the lines and play by the rules,” I think of things like realistic painting, or classical music. Fields where you’re trying to get close to some specific ideal: what the thing you’re painting actually looks like, the notes that the composer wrote down. But if you’re not trying to paint a bowl of fruit that looks exactly like a bowl of fruit, how are you going to say that a realistic style is better than an impressionistic or abstract style? And, in the same way, how are you going to say that Raymond Carver’s style is better than Cormac McCarthy’s, or that Greer Gilman’s style is better than Hemingway’s? I have personal preferences, sure. But all of these writers are writers who are in control of their craft. They’re not aiming for some single standard of Good Writing; they’re aiming for their own particular visions.

And somehow we have this tendency to say that it’s only the writers who are in control of their craft who are allowed to follow their own particular visions. The rest of us have to follow the Rules, and stop using adverbs.

People tend to point to me as the person who’s the computer expert, but I learned everything I know about computers just by trying different things to see what happened. It’s only by trying this thing and that thing and Googling shell commands and crying that I’ve been able to put together in my head a pretty good model for how a computer works. The people who don’t trust themselves to try different things just to see what happens, the people who don’t trust themselves to make mistakes, are the ones who are always raising their hand for help as soon as something happens that they don’t expect.

I think it’s the same way with writing, or with any kind of art. You can try all you like to follow the Rules, but one of these days your gut will say, this doesn’t work. I don’t know how to do this. And you try building the new tools that you need, and maybe they don’t work perfectly and maybe you build something that’s kind of rickety and weird. But it’s yours. It’s what you needed to make.

A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend has a structure that interweaves two different timelines. I fought against that so hard. I thought that trying to interweave two different timelines was totally pretentious and you shouldn’t try it unless you’re a supergenius. (I think I first encountered the technique in Angela Johnson’s The First Part Last; Angela Johnson is, for the record, a supergenius.) But my gut told me that it was the right thing for the book, and I had to follow my gut.

So I don’t think there’s any such thing as writing with training wheels on. I don’t think that you’re going to gain anything by sticking to the advice that people give you and the techniques they say are safe. You have to have a space for just smearing the paint across the canvas and seeing what happens when you do this and when you do that.

There are a lot of times I’d rather read a bad book than a safe one.