Last week in our fool's cap method here we were talking about narrative device which means who tells the story like Huck Finn tells a story in Huckleberry Finn or Scout tells the story in the Killamockingbird but there's a second half to this to narrative device and the second half is who is this person telling the story to and what tone a voice do they take towards this and this is an again it's another thing that we as writers we have to decide right away we can't write the first word until we know this so I'm thinking of the opening sentences of the Sun also rises by Ernest Hemingway it starts out like this Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton do not think I'm much impressed with this as a boxing title but it meant a lot to Cohn now what's interesting about that to me is that the character the speaker is a character named Jake Barnes but the tone he's taking to a reader is a kind of a confidential friend like I'm gonna take you inside this story I'm gonna tell you everything and I'm not holding anything back and now in a thriller it might be a whole different tone of voice if we're in the third person and we're telling a story of a nuclear submarine like a Tom Clancy story or James Reese you know thriller like by Jack Carr in that case the sort of the avatar of the reader to me in my mind is like a businessman on an airplane and it's a sort of a male to male tone of voice and a male to male reader that they're talking to and the narrator the third person narrator the omniscient author will be talking from a real point of knowledge ability like in any kind of Jack Carr thriller you know that Jack Carr himself was a Navy seal sniper and he knows that world totally that he's writing about but what he'll be talking to is he'll give credit to the person in the tone of voice the reader that the reader can keep up with them and we'll talk at a very high level again a kind of a confidential level we have to decide this at the start now I'll tell you another example from my own stuff one of my books last to the Amazon's is a story set in around 1200 BC about the race of female warriors and it's and and told us if it's absolutely real from that time and it's told in the first person by a young woman or actually an older woman remembering her younger days when she was present at the last kind of battles of the Amazon's but the interesting thing and this way this worked in the story was she's not telling it generically to readers but the conceit of the story is that she has gathered a group of young girls young Athenian women of a special class and she's telling the story to them and saying to them you must never tell us to a man not your husband not your brother not your son no man must ever hear this story and that gives it a whole different feeling basically what I'm saying here is when we get into narrative device we have to think not only who tells a story but who are they telling it to and what tone of voice are they taking very important we can't write word one until we know this