[stephengoodwin]

Call it a best practice for inexperienced artists and writers. If I, for instance, were to take up painting as a hobby, I would try to find some artistic formula or method to follow before branching out into a more unique style.

I would consider this more important for writing than art, since reading novels involves much more of a time commitment from your audiences to appreciate, whereas art gives more flexibility in deciding how long your audience wants to spend with it.

However, there's a difference between bad art and writing and bad programming. Bad art and writing lacks appreciation. Bad programming is full of errors, hard to maintain, and runs slow, giving an overall poor user experience.