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ROBERT OLEN BUTLER: The ultimate key to being a good writer is the ability to find your own personal voice. The voice we have for the page has some very strong similarities to our most impassioned verbal voices. And to be a good writer, you must find your way into that voice, to be able to access that voice. at will, to be able to apply that voice to the ideas or the sense, the impressions of the world that you have, and then to be able to speak to the page. In as natural and almost as literal away speaking to the page as if you were speaking to your most intimate friend in the most intimate of circumstances. The third person voice, It seems to me, well, voice itself, point of view itself, should be one of those completely organic decisions within the individual work that's being created. It's not something you decide to do for whatever technical or intellectual reasons. It has to be the right point of view for the story that's being told. The thing about third person is that there is still inevitably a persona to the voice, even if that the most objective third person voice, far from being any kind of a character in the tale being told, nevertheless has a persona. There are inevitable-- --in speaking of events that have emotional valences to them and in using the language, which is shaped by emotional impulses, you cannot escape the fact that the third person persona has a de facto implicit emotional being. And that's something that a lot of writers ignore. They think it's a way to escape from the immediacy and the emotional involvement of the story at hand. It's for many writers a way of avoiding the unconscious. It's one of those tricks. You distance yourself just enough, but the distance for a good third person narrator must be there only to serve the fuller, unfolding of the intense, sensual reality of the story being told, not as a way to distance yourself or therefore for the reader from the emotional content of the tale. And I think that's a critical aspect to the third person that often gets overlooked.