NOTRE DAME OF NEW ILOILO, INC.

A Diocesan School
NEW ILOILO, TANTANGAN, SOUTH COTABATO
Tel. No. (083) 229 – 1113
Email Address: [email protected]

SUBJECT: CREATIVE WRITING GRADE LEVEL: TWELVE

QUARTER: ONE WEEK: TWO (October 5-16, 2020)

I - OBJECTIVES: At the end of the lesson, you are expected to:

1. identify the various elements, techniques, and literary devices in fiction;
2. determine various modes of fiction
3. write a short story applying the various elements, techniques, and literary devices.
II - PRE-ASSESSMENT
Direction: Read and understand the remarks below and answer the questions. Write your answers on a separate paper.
 Which remark do you think will send you changing your clothes faster: “You look terrible in that dress!” or “Is
that your new dress? It’s pretty like a curtain!” Now, thinking about that, why do you think it is important to use
satire and irony to raise awareness, or criticize and encourage change, in a certain community, in a certain
country, at a certain time?

III - CONTENT/ DISCUSSION/ INFORMATION

FICTION: Irony, Theme, and Point of View
IRONY, SARCASM, SATIRE
Irony: the discrepancy between what is said and what is meant, what is said and what is done, what is expected or intended
and what happens, what is meant or said and what others understand, or two or more incongruous objects, actions, persons
juxtaposed. Sometimes irony is classified into types:
• in situational irony, expectations aroused by a situation are reversed;
• in cosmic irony or the irony of fate, misfortune is the result of fate, chance or God;
• in dramatic irony, the audience knows more than the characters, so that words and action have additional meaning;
• Socratic irony is named after Socrates' teaching method, whereby he assumes ignorance and openness to opposing points
of view which turn out to be foolish.

Irony is often confused with sarcasm and satire.

• Sarcasm is praise which is really an insult; sarcasm generally involves malice, the desire to put someone down, e.g., "This
is my brilliant son, who failed out of college."
• Satire is the exposure of the vices or follies of an individual, a group, an institution, an idea, a society, etc., usually with a
view to correcting it. Satirists frequently use irony.

Life is filled with ironies, as in the following “true news stories.”

1. The average cost of rehabilitating a seal after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska was $80,000. At a special ceremony,
two of the most expensively saved animals were released back into the wild amid cheers and applause from onlookers. A
minute later they were both eaten by a killer whale.
2. A psychology student in New York rented out her spare room to a carpenter in order to nag him constantly and study his
reactions. After weeks of needling, he snapped and beat her repeatedly with an axe, leaving her mentally retarded.
3. In 1992, Frank Perkins of Los Angeles made an attempt on the world flagpole-sitting record. Suffering from the flu, he
came down eight hours short of the 400-day record, to find that his sponsor had gone bust, his girlfriend had left him and his
phone and electricity had been cut off.
4. A woman came home to find her husband in the kitchen, shaking frantically with what looked like a wire running from his
waist towards the electric kettle. Intending to jolt him away from the deadly current she whacked him with a handy plank of
wood by the back door, breaking his arm in two places. Till that moment he had been happily listening to his Walkman.
5. Two animal rights protesters were protesting at the cruelty of sending pigs to a slaughterhouse in Bonn. Suddenly the pigs,
all two thousand of them, escaped through a broken fence and stampeded, trampling the two hapless protesters to death. 6.
Iraqi terrorist Khay Rahnajet didn' t pay enough postage on a letter bomb. It came back with "return to sender" stamped on it.
Forgetting it was the bomb, he opened it and was blown to bits.

SUBJECT AND THEME

If you just want to write a story, just any story, you don’t need a theme. Some stories can do without theme. But to write
really great stories, you might want to consider a theme or two. Yes, you can have many themes in one story; knock yourself
out, put in 25 themes if you want. If you manage them well, you may be on to something that’s never done before!(That last
sentence there is perhaps sarcastic, but you can really have several themes-maybe 1,2, or 3, but not 25-in a story)

Theme has something to do with your view of the world, how you see things, how you want things to be, how you color the
world that you see. Any topic can be a subject of a story: love, war, death, cats, dogs, ticks, mites, hotdogs, AIDS,
haemorrhoids, as in any topic at all!

Now you can develop themes using these topic if you have really strong opinions about them. What is your belief system
about love, death, or cats? Or your personal views about ticks, AIDS, or haemorrhoids?

Take love as a subject. And take a joke:

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 NOTRE DAME OF NEW ILOILO, INC.
A Diocesan School
NEW ILOILO, TANTANGAN, SOUTH COTABATO
Tel. No. (083) 229 – 1113
Email Address: [email protected]
Lover 1: Sweetie pie love, are you a password?
Lover 2: Why?
Lover 1: Because I cannot seem to forget you.
Lover 2: Oh, how sweet of you, my love!
Lover 1: Yeah, but I can easily change* you, too. Hahaha!

(*Of course, replace is perhaps the more accurate word for the joke, but change here is pretty much correct in Filipino
English. You can still laugh at the joke.)

In the given joke, the theme is “Love is fickle,” or at least, “Love is not forever.” In the movie Titanic, or its theme song “My
Heart Will Go On,” however, the message, or the theme, is definitely “Love is forever.”
In literature, some of the more common themes on the subject of love are:
1. Love conquers all.
2. It’s better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all.
3. The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love, and loved in return.
4. Romance ruins friendship.
5. First love never dies.
6. Love is blind.
7. If you love somebody, you have to set him or her free. Love hurts.
8. The course of true love never really runs smooth.
9. Where there is love, there is pain.
POINT OF VIEW
Point of View (POV), or perspective, is the angle, the perception, the position that you take to tell your story. It answers the
question, “Who is telling the story?”
Two of the most common POV techniques are the first person POV, wherein the story is told by the narrator from his or her
point of view; and the third person POV, wherein the narrator does not appear in the events of the story,but rather tells the
story by referring to all characters and places in the third person using third person pronouns and proper nouns.
Seldom used, but equally valid, is the second person POV. If you have read Jay McIberney’s novel Bright Light, Big City,
that’s a fine example. Its first chapter title reads: “IT IS SIX A.M. DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU ARE?” Its opening three
sentences are: “You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time in the morning. But here you are,
and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy. You are at a nightclub talking to a
girl with shaved head.” And it continues using the second person pronoun you for the rest of the novel.
The first person POV can still be divided into two angels:
1. The objective first person wherein the story is narrated by a fictional character who plays a minor part in the story or isn’t
present in the story at all.
Example: Ishmael in Moby-Dick and Nick Carraway in the The Great Gatsby.
2. The subjective first person wherein the first person narrator is the main character or one of the main characters, in the
story.
Example: Huck Finn is both the narrator and main character in Mark Twain’s The Adventure of
Huckleberry Finn.
The third person POV can also be divided into three perspectives:
1. The omniscient third person wherein the narration sees, knows, and usually reveals everything about the characters in the
story. It is godlike because like an all-powerful, all-knowing deity, the narration can see into the hearts and minds of its
characters, revealing their most intimate secrets.
Example: Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere and Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables.
2. The objective third person wherein the narration simply describes what the characters do and say without giving the
readers access to their thoughts. It is like a video camera, recording and reporting everything it sees but allowing the readers
to make up their own minds about the characters’ feelings, thoughts, and motivations.
Example: Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon.
3. The close third person, a.k.a. limited third person or free indirect discourse, wherein the narrative uses third person
pronouns, and like the omniscient, it gets inside the minds of the characters, but the whole story is generally told from the
point of view of only one character.
Example: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.

FICTION: Techniques and literary devices

FORESHADOWING
Foreshadowing is a literary device in which a writer gives an advance hint of what is to come later in the story.
Foreshadowing often appears at the beginning of a story, or a chapter, and helps the reader develop expectations about the
coming events in a story. There are various ways to create foreshadowing.
A writer may use character dialogues to hint at what may occur in the future. In addition, any event or action in the story may
throw a hint to the readers about future events or actions. Even a title of a work or a chapter title can act as a clue that
suggests what is going to happen. Foreshadowing in fiction creates an atmosphere of suspense in a story, so that the readers
are interested to know more.

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 NOTRE DAME OF NEW ILOILO, INC.
A Diocesan School
NEW ILOILO, TANTANGAN, SOUTH COTABATO
Tel. No. (083) 229 – 1113
Email Address: [email protected]
Short Examples of Foreshadowing

1. The final graveyard flower is blooming, and its smell drifts through their house, speaking gently the names of their
dead.
(Foreshadows death)
2. The evening was still. Suddenly, a cool breeze started blowing and made a windy night.
(Foreshadows thunderstorm)
3. The most awful thing happened on a stormy evening,
The battle between good and evil started.
(Foreshadows danger)
4. Mary pulled back the curtains and saw some magpies sitting on the wall.
(Foreshadows gossip)
5. They thought there would not be more bodies; however, they could not believe the thought.
(Foreshadows murder)
6. An old man opens his drawer to find a magnifying glass, and sees a revolver.
(Foreshadows warning)
7. In the middle of the night, the father hears the back door opening. He rushes to check on his kids, but a masked
intruder is blocking the way with a knife.
(Foreshadows threat)
8. Rainbow sparks,
With shining lights.
(Foreshadows optimism)
9. Inhale fresh air, exhale bad breath.
(Foreshadows new ideas)
10. From the window, the gusts look so furious, the roofs of high buildings are stripped off, and the trees are torn up in
the city.
(Foreshadows someone’s angst)

SYMBOLISM AND MOTIF

A symbol is an object that represents something else, and in fact, are a part of your daily life, not just a piece of literature.
You may not realize it, but you encounter millions of symbols in your everyday life, such as:

 Traffic lights: Red light means stop, green means go, and yellow means caution
 The arrow means "this way"
 A cross represents religion, or more specifically, Christianity
 Light bulb means "new idea"
 Numerals 1 and 0, put together, mean ten
 A heart means love
 Logos represent brands, like the Nike swoosh or Mac's Apple
 Even our names are symbols that represent us as individual humans

Symbols can hold unexpected meaning, but upon further investigation, can make a lot of sense. For example, if you read a
scene that involves a skunk lurking in the background, you might wonder what that animal could signify. But, if there's
something that foul in the works of your story, like a breakup or a bit of bad luck, the skunk begins to bring up imagery of
something that is less than pleasant to experience. Thus, the symbolism. 

To better understand symbolism, you might ask yourself to consider what a variety of everyday objects might stand for if
they were used in a piece of literation. For example, think about emotions or thoughts that come to mind when you see the
following:

 Flowers (represent nature, birth, growth, femininity, beauty)

 Lightening bolt (represents speed, strength, power, electricity) 
 Spider web (represents entanglement, entrapment, mystery)

While a symbol might occur once in literature to signify an idea or an emotion, a motif can be an element or idea that repeats
throughout that piece of literature. It is closely related to a theme but is more of a supporting role to the theme than a theme
itself. It is within the pattern of repetition that the power and impact of a motif are found. A motif could, in fact, be expressed
by a collection of related symbols.

How do symbols and motifs work together?

Since multiple symbols can be used to explain a motif, let's break down a few examples. Let's say we have a story about a
family struggling to stay together, parents considering divorce. We might encounter a motif of fragmentation that could
come from several symbols that appear in a book:

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 NOTRE DAME OF NEW ILOILO, INC.
A Diocesan School
NEW ILOILO, TANTANGAN, SOUTH COTABATO
Tel. No. (083) 229 – 1113
Email Address: [email protected]
 Shattered glass
 A runaway (pet, teen, car)
 An explosion
 A scattered puzzle

Sometimes a motif can also be a study on contrast, like the theme of good versus evil, or "light and dark." A series of
symbols that could represent this motif might be:

 Moon shadows (shades of darkness)

 A candle (a light in the darkness)
 Storm clouds (temporary darkness)
 A ray of sunshine (emerging from darkness)
 A tunnel (through the darkness)

The symbols and motifs you discover in your reading will lead to the understanding of an overall theme of your book.
To find the theme of a book, you should look for an overall message or lesson. If you do encounter the motif of "light and
dark" in a book, you should think about a message that the author is trying to send about life.

The light and dark of a story might tell us:

 Love survives death

 Life renews itself
 Knowledge conquers fear

Tip: if you see a series of symbols or a collection of motifs, but you can't come up with a theme, try inserting a verb to
describe the object. If you see a lot of references to fire, for example, you can ask yourself what action we might associate
with fire.

 Fire burns
 Fire destroys
 Fire warms

Consider which of these behaviors make sense in the context of the novel or story you are reading

MOOD, TONE, AND STYLE

As a literary essential, mood is the element that you use to evoke certain feelings or vibes in your readers through your words
and descriptions. In short, it is the feeling that the reader gets from your words! Go ahead and call it ambience or
atmosphere; just understand that it should create an emotional situation that should envelop or surround your readers to
ensure their impassioned attachment to your work. Because once you have emotionally stirred them, your readers would
probably have an easier time understanding your message and enjoying what you have written.

To create a certain mood, you may employ what you have already learned about setting, theme, tone, and diction. Another
way to create a mood is by adjusting your diction and tone.

Now, expand that understanding by recognizing several levels of dictions:

Your diction is designed as formal diction, otherwise identified as high diction, when your preferred vocabulary is devoid
of slang, idioms, colloquialisms, and contractions; or when your articulation contains polysyllabic words, sophisticated
syntax, and elegant word choices so much so that your expression results in an elevated tone, a florid style, and a sense of
stately attitude or courtly dignity as is exemplified by this vermiculate statement.

Neutral diction, on the other hand, uses standard language and vocabulary without difficult words like this simple sentence.
In this kind of diction, it’s also possible to use contractions like the one you see in this sentence.
In informal diction, a.k.a. nonformal diction, nonformal dic, or low diction, everyday vicab is used, guys! It’s a relaxed,
chill diction-thingy, pretty much like a cool convo among kaberks that includes common and simple terms, idiomas, street
lingo, slang, ‘n’ contractions like diz talk, dude! 

One last word on tone: Your tone lends shape and gives life to your work by creating the mood as it stimulates your readers
to read your work as serious, comical, sarcastic, cheerful, or depressing. If your tone in writing is friendly and conversational,
in most likelihood, that warm and accessible attitude will be perceived and felt by your readers so that when they read your
words, they will approach it with more kindness and sympathy.

One last word about mood: Because tone influences the mood and theme often determines the tone, then you can easily see
how theme affects the mood. If your theme or central idea is that “Death is a sad and depressing event,” in most likelihood,

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 NOTRE DAME OF NEW ILOILO, INC.
A Diocesan School
NEW ILOILO, TANTANGAN, SOUTH COTABATO
Tel. No. (083) 229 – 1113
Email Address: [email protected]
your tone or your approach to the topic will be glum and melancholic, which will translate to a mood of unhappiness, sorrow,
or mournfulness in your readers as they read your work. On the other hand, if your approach is comical, then maybe your
theme is not that death is sad and depressing, but perhaps “Death is not at all so gloomy and dispiriting.” When your tone is
comical, it will be received as such by your readers so that their mood while they are reading your comical piece will be jolly
and cheerful.

IV - ASSESSMENT
A – Direction: Answer the following questions carefully and write your answers on a separate
paper.
o What is your favorite book? What was the POV used by the author? Did this particular author write other
books that have a different POV? While POV is almost always dictated by the story materials, do you think
that being good at a certain POV can help you better establish your won personal style or your unique
writer’s voice?

B - Direction: Write a short story to illustrate the theme “The path of true love is not always
straight.” Give your work a title that does not mention the word love. Write your
answer on a separate paper.
V - FEEDBACK
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