This is not to say that no one really knows what fiction is or what its limits are; it is simply to recognize that the value or “staying power” of any piece of literature has to do, finally, with the character and personality of the artist who created it—his instincts, his knowledge of art and the world, his mastery. Mastery holds fast. What the beginning writer needs, discouraging as it may be to hear, is not a set of rules but mastery—among other things, mastery of the art of breaking so-called rules. When an artist of true authority speaks—someone like Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Racine, Dostoevsky, or Melville—we listen, all attention, even if what he says seems at first a little queer. (At any rate we listen if we’re old enough, experienced enough, so that we know what kinds of things are boring, juvenile, simple-minded, and what things are not. To read well, one also needs a certain kind of mastery.)