Is it important for a writer to follow a set of rules to write a book?

Creativity is entirely a product of pure instincts and not by the set of guidelines!

 I could never plan before writing. It just comes to me as a spontaneous thought. All I have to do is to fall into the situation and the characters in my mind. Rest simply happens with the flow. Its precisely a feeling of meditating! You enter an altogether different world- a world that your creative mind and your thoughts have build with the people who you imagine to see or talk.

If ever I had bound myself to any kinds of rules and guidelines, the result had always been more of made up emotions and not something that could be said to be internal revelations of a heart. It's, in fact, a foolproof way to vent out your innermost feelings and design them to the most compassionate way so that it truly becomes a place where every reader finds their haven of thoughts. Maybe that's why some stories or books take us to a journey where we always wanted to be. It's an escapism for the writer as well as the reader who are bonded together in a common thought and get to feel similarly.
One of my readers ended up crying while reading a tragic scene from THE GIFTED ANALOGY. I think that was the greatest compliment any writer could get..... to make your reader feel exactly the same like you wanted them to feel!!

My thoughts are surely not bounded with any geographical strings. I preferred to design my own world. Like you can see I set up the story in a fictitious place called Angelston in my novel THE GIFTED ANALOGY which is likely to be a small town somewhere in Europe. My readers were surprised to know that such place doesn't exist and that no one has ever been there.
That's the beauty of art and creativity! A writer should possess the most important quality of expressing the waves of thoughts in the most beautiful way as if painting a picture!!