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ROBERT OLEN BUTLER: Fiction, inescapably, is the art form of human yearning. And all good fiction has at its center a character who yearns. Now James Joyce appropriated a term from the Catholic church to describe a very important and inescapable aspect of a good work of fictional art. The term is "epiphany," which means literally a shining forth. And he used it to describe that moment that a good work of fiction moves to at the end, where something shines forth in its essence. And that's certainly true. That is, that epiphany is absolutely necessary in a good work of fictional art. But I think there are two epiphanies in every good piece of fiction. The other epiphany occurs very early in the piece, and that's where, for the audience, for the reader, the yearning of the central character shines forth. And so, I never-- I am not ready to write any work of fiction until there's a character in my unconscious who embodies that paradox, by the way, that I know that character is a product of the deepest, white hot center of me. And yet, it is from the center from my life and my experience has been completely forgotten. Graham Greene once said that all good novelists have bad memories. He says what you remember, comes out as journalism. What you forget, goes into the compost of the imagination. And this character's a creature of that, of my compost. But, he or she comes to me as an other. It is from the deepest part of me, but at the same time, the paradox is, I know it's not an other, a separate entity. But I am not ready to write about that character until I have a deep and strong and clear intuition as to what that character's yearning is. So, for a work of fiction, for me, that I think is the equivalent of what an expository piece would be premised. And I cannot write without that.