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of view.

Point of view is sometimes described from the perspective of a movie camera, but a better analogy is the media coverage of a professional football game.

* An author narrating a story from his own point of view is comparable to a radio announcer describing the game from a broadcast booth.

* A character narrating the story from his own point of view is comparable to play-by-play coverage from a football player rigged with a microphone and a helmet camera.

* Having the story told by an assumed persona (omniscient or objective) compares to coverage by television commentators with the aid of a dozen cameras stationed at various angles around the field, including a movable camera hanging over the players.

PERSON Regardless of whom the author selects to be the narrator, the story may be told in one of three persons, singular or plural:

* First person (I, we)

* Second person (you)

* Third person (he, she, it, they)

Novels are rarely told in second person or plural, but an Internet search reveals plenty of examples in short fiction. For novel-length fiction, the choice is usually either first-person singular and third-person singular.

TENSE
The author also has three basic choices for tense:

* Present tense

* Future tense

* Past tense

As described by Orson Scott Card, in Character & Viewpoint, some writers have experimented with stories using subjective, superlative, or imperative tenses. An Internet search reveals examples of fiction written in the present and future tenses, but the vast majority of novels are written in past tense.

OBTRUSIVENESS Obtrusiveness is a measure of how noticeable the narrator is. Very noticeable narrators are described as obtrusive, while barely noticeable narrators are described as unobtrusive.

The obtrusiveness of narrators may vary from story to story, even stories written by the same author. Obtrusiveness may also vary from one part of a story to another part of the same story.

Stories narrated by a character have an obtrusive narrator (the character, narrating in first person). Stories narrated by the author or by an assumed persona may range from very obtrusive to so unnoticeable there appears to be no narrator at all.

TONE Through the narrator flows a story's tone, its mood. According to Nancy Kress, in Writer's Digest, July 2003, "A very general definition of tone is the way a story feels.'"

Tone, explains Kress, can range from literary (with its attention to diction, descriptive detail, slower pace, and loftiness) to straight forward (which

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