I have two main responses to people telling me, “You can’t do that!” The first is, “Why would I want to?” and the second is, “Watch me.”

Fortunately for my health and the state of my driver’s licence, the latter attitude is expressed most often in writing, rather than in combinations of alcohol and speed. (Well, okay. Sometimes it’s in combinations of alcohol and writing.)

There are prescriptivists and descriptivists out there. The former tell you what can and cannot be done, and will go on at length why this is so, usually pulling in all sorts of reasons based in social values — “It’s more polite” or “This is the what defines this form” or that old chestnut, “This is the traditional way.” The descriptivists will say, “This is the way it was done here, but it was done that way over there, and those folks in the corner? They’ve turned everything backwards.” In short, prescriptivists tell you how something should be; descriptivists tell you how it is.

I’m on the side of the descriptivists, more and more as I get older. This isn’t because the descriptive is better; it’s because, for me, the prescriptive is the base form. For me, creativity doesn’t lie within the lines; its most interesting expression, for me, is when the artist not only colors outside the lines, but incorporates color and lines in a way I haven’t seen before.

Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of different things decrying work which doesn’t stay within its lines. Maybe it’s poor wordsmithing, or unusual characters, or a plot that pays more attention to adrenaline than coherency. Maybe it’s taking a genre convention and dressing it up in a weird outfit, then plunking that down in the middle of nowhere and giving it Lego to build its own setting. Maybe it’s taking a treasured classic and not only changing all the names, but changing the settings, the genders of the characters, and the central reason why everything happens.

I understand why some readers react badly to such work, just as I understand why they might react just as badly to modern sculpture or Cubist painting or smooth jazz. But that doesn’t mean I sympathize with their position. There is a lot of work which I don’t like, for a variety of reasons — some of them prescriptivist. So? That doesn’t mean the work is bad, or that it isn’t enjoyable … or even that *I* didn’t enjoy it. It means that those colors? Those lines? They don’t work for me. But they worked for someone else, and really, that’s the basis of all advancement, in the arts or anything else.

But I do like my own pieces where I’ve gone, “Watch me.” Bye-bye, lines. Wild blue yonder, here I come.