SELF-DIRECTED LEARNING ACTIVITY SHEET IN CREATIVE NONFICTION

Worksheet No. 5 Quarter 3

Name of Learner: __________________________________ Grade Level/Section: ______________ Date: _________

USING THE LITERARY CONVENTIONS OF A SHORT STORY

I. LEARNING SKILLS
MELC: Write a draft of a short piece using any of the literary conventions of genre following the pointers (choosing a
topic, formulating a thesis statement, organizing and developing ideas, using any literary conventions of a
genre, ensuring that theme and technique are effectively developed).
 Evaluate other’s draft based on clarity of idea, appropriate choice of literary element, appropriate use of the
element, effective combination of the idea and the chosen literary element.
 Revise the draft of a short piece using any of the literary conventions of a genre (e.g., plot for a narrative
piece)
Specific Objectives
At the end of the lesson, you are able to:
1. write a short literary work of your choice (using any writing convention of a genre);
2. edit at least one work of your peer based on a set criteria/standard; and
3. revise your work based on the peer feedback.

II. INTRODUCTORY CONCEPT

Throughout your stay in school (that’s from elementary through senior high), you must have had countless
experiences writing your very own formal and informal compositions. How was your writing experience? What
did you remember about theme writing? In this lesson, you will be adding another writing experience in your
school life. This time, you will be doing it with an awareness of the different literary conventions, while being
meticulous about the writing process from pre-writing to publishing, so that you will get to enjoy the and be able
to succeed as a writer.
Later in this lesson, you will be asked to write a short literary work using any of the writing conventions of a
short story. To be able to do that, read the following pointers.

Short Story Tips: 10 Hacks to Improve Your Creative Writing (Jerz Literacy Weblog, est 1999)
Writing short stories means beginning as close to the climax as possible — everything else is a distraction.
A novel can take a more meandering path but should still start with a scene that sets the tone for the whole
book.
A short story conserves characters and scenes, typically by focusing on just one conflict, and drives towards a
sudden, unexpected revelation. Go easy on the exposition and talky backstory — your reader doesn’t need to
know everything that you know about your characters.

1. Get Started: Emergency Tips

What does your protagonist want?
When the story begins, what morally significant action has your protagonist taken towards that goal?
What obstacles must the protagonist overcome in order to reach the goal?
What unexpected consequences — directly related to the protagonist’s goal-oriented actions —
ramp up the emotional energy of the story?
Show Don't (Just) Tell (What details from the setting, dialog, and tone help you tell the story?)
At the climax, what morally significant choice does your protagonist make?
Drawing on your own real-life experiences, such as winning the big game, bouncing back after an
illness or injury, or dealing with the death of a loved one, are attractive choices for students who are
looking for a “personal essay” topic. But simply listing the emotions you experienced (“It was
exciting” “I’ve never been so scared in all my life” “I miss her so much”) is not the same thing as
generating emotions for your readers to experience.
2. Write a Catchy First Paragraph. Your narrative should catch your reader’s attention with the unusual, the
unexpected, an action, or a conflict. Begin with tension and immediacy. Remember that short stories need
to start close to their end.
3. Developing Characters. In order to develop a living, breathing, multi-faceted character, it is important to
know way more about the character than you will ever use in the story. Imagining all these details will help
you get to know your character, but your reader probably won’t need to know much more than the most
important things in four areas:
a) Appearance. Gives your reader a visual understanding of the character.
b) Action. Show the reader what kind of person your character is, by describing actions rather than simply
listing adjectives.

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 c) Speech. Develop the character as a person — don’t merely have your character announce important plot
details.
d) Thought. Bring the reader into your character’s mind, to show them your character’s unexpressed
memories, fears, and hopes.
4. Choose a Point of View. As a writer, you need to determine who is going to tell the story and how much
information is available for the narrator to reveal in the short story. The narrator can be directly involved in
the action subjectively, or the narrator might only report the action objectively.
5. Write Meaningful Dialogue. Each speaker gets his/her own paragraph, and the paragraph includes
whatever you wish to say about what the character is doing when speaking.
6. Use setting and context.
a) Setting includes the time, location, context, and atmosphere where the plot takes place. Remember to
combine setting with characterization and plot.
b) Include enough detail to let your readers picture the scene but only details that add something to the
story. (For example, do not describe Mary locking the front door, walking across the yard, opening the
garage door, putting air in her bicycle tires, getting on her bicycle–none of these details matter except
that she rode out of the driveway without looking down the street.)
c) Use two or more senses in your descriptions of setting.
d) Rather than feed your readers information about the weather, population statistics, or how far it is to the
grocery store, substitute descriptive details so your reader can experience the location the way your
characters do.
7. Set Up the Plot. Jerome Stern says it is how you set up the situation, where the turning points of the story
are, and what the characters do at the end of the story.
a) Explosion or “Hook.” A thrilling, gripping, stirring event or problem that grabs the reader’s attention right
away.
b) Conflict. A character versus the internal self or an external something or someone.
c) Exposition. Background information required for seeing the characters in context.
d) Complication. One or more problems that keep a character from their intended goal.
e) Transition. Image, symbol, dialogue that joins paragraphs and scenes together.
f) Flashback. Remembering something that happened before the short story takes place.
g) Climax. When the rising action of the story reaches the peak.
h) Falling Action. Releasing the action of the story after the climax.
i) Resolution. When the internal or external conflict is resolved.
8. Create conflict and Tension. Conflict produces tension that makes the story begin. Tension is created by
opposition between the character or characters and internal or external forces or conditions. By balancing
the opposing forces of the conflict, you keep readers glued to the pages wondering how the story will end.
Yourke’s Conflict Checklist
a) Mystery. Explain just enough to tease readers. Never give everything away.
b) Empowerment. Give both sides options.
c) Progression. Keep intensifying the number and type of obstacles the protagonist faces.
d) Causality. Hold fictional characters more accountable than real people. Characters who make mistakes
frequently pay, and, at least in fiction, commendable folks often reap rewards.
e) Surprise. Provide enough complexity to prevent readers predicting events too far in advance.
f) Empathy. Encourage reader identification with characters and scenarios that pleasantly or (unpleasantly)
resonate with their own sweet dreams (or night sweats).
g) Insight. Reveal something about human nature.
h) Universality. Present a struggle that most readers find meaningful, even if the details of that struggle
reflect a unique place and time.
i) High Stakes. Convince readers that the outcome matters because someone they care about could lose
something precious. Trivial clashes often produce trivial fiction.
9. Build to a Crisis or Climax. This is the turning point of the story–the most exciting or dramatic moment.
While a good story needs a crisis, a random event such as a car crash or a sudden illness is simply an
emergency –unless it somehow involves a conflict that makes the reader care about the characters.
10. Find a Resolution. The solution to the conflict. In short fiction, it is difficult to provide a complete resolution
and you often need to just show that characters are beginning to change in some way or starting to see
things differently.
Yourke examines some of the options for ending a story.
a) Open. Readers determine the meaning.
e.g., Brendan’s eyes looked away from the priest and up to the mountains.
b) Resolved. Clear-cut outcome.
e.g., While John watched in despair, Helen loaded up the car with her belongings and drove away.
c) Parallel to Beginning. Like the beginning situation or image.

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 e.g., They were driving their 1964 Chevrolet Impala down the highway while the wind blew through
their hair.
Her father drove up in a new 1964 Chevrolet Impala, a replacement for the one that burned
up.
d) Monologue. Character comments.
e.g., I wish Tom could have known Sister Dalbec’s prickly guidance before the dust devils of Sin
City battered his soul.
e) Dialogue. Characters converse.
f) Literal Image. Setting or aspect of setting resolves the plot.
e.g., The aqueducts were empty now and the sun was shining once more.
g) Symbolic Image. Details represent a meaning beyond the literal one.
e.g., Looking up at the sky, I saw a cloud cross the shimmering blue sky above us as we stood in
the morning heat of Sin City. https://jerz.setonhill.edu/writing/creative1/shortstory/)

III. ACTIVITIES (Note: Use a separate bond paper for your answers in practice tasks 1-3 and assessment.)

Practice Task 1: A MEMORABLE LITERARY WORK

Recall some literary works which you have already read, they may be from the genre of fiction, drama, or poetry.
Enumerate at least three (title, genre, and author) that impacted you as a reader? What do you think made them
memorable?
Practice Task 2: A MEMORABLE LITERARY WORK IN DETAILS
Choose a literary work (fiction or drama) which you have read. Identify down specific details of its literary elements.
Write your answers on the table below; an example is given to guide you.

Title of Literary Work: The Little Prince (Antoine De Saint Exupery) Genre classification: novella

Genre Specific Answers

Element
Characters The little prince, the narrator (pilot), the rose, the fox, the snake, the baobabs, the king, the vain man, the
drunkard, the businessman, the lamplighter, the geographer, the railway switchman, the salesclerk, the roses
in the rose garden, the three-petaled flower, the little prince’s echo, the Turkish astronomer
Plot The narrator, an airplane pilot, crashes in the Sahara desert. The crash badly damages his airplane and leaves
the narrator with very little food or water. As he is worrying over his predicament, he is approached by the little
prince,
a very serious little blond boy who asks the narrator to draw him a sheep. The narrator obliges, and the two
become friends. The pilot learns that the little prince comes from a small planet that the little prince calls
Asteroid 325 but that people on Earth call Asteroid B-612. The little prince took great care of this planet,
preventing any bad seeds from growing and making sure it was never overrun by baobab trees. One day, a
mysterious rose sprouted on the planet and the little prince fell in love with it. But when he caught the rose in a
lie one day, he decided that he could not trust her anymore. He grew lonely and decided to leave. Despite a
last-minute reconciliation with the rose, the prince set out to explore other planets and cure his loneliness.
Conflict Internal conflict - the conflict that arises near the end of the book is the need for the narrator to let The Little
Prince go
Setting Sahara Desert
Point of view First person (told by the pilot)
Theme The dangers of narrow-mindedness, enlightenment through exploration

Title of Literary Work: _________________________________________ Genre classification: _______________

Genre Element Specific Answers

Characters
Plot
Conflict
Setting
Point of View
Theme
Practice Task 3: A CLOSE LOOK AT A NONFICTION TEXT
Read this creative nonfiction work then answer the questions that follow.

We raced to the hospital. When we arrived, my four uncles, my three aunts and my step-grandmother were
already there. My mother and I kneeled by the bed. His eyes were open, and we couldn’t close them because all the
mucus or whatever it was clumped so the eyelids wouldn’t budge. The funeral home people came to take his body. It
was an incredibly painful experience. When they straightened his body out, I realized what a tall man he had been.
They covered him up in sheets and I thought that he was about to scream: “Will someone get these damn sheets off
me!” because that’s what he would’ve done if he were alive and covered in sheets. We accompanied the funeral

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 people to the elevator. The hospital staff had done an announcement that a deceased and his family were going to
pass and that everyone come out and stand solemnly at the side of the hallway. Back in the room, my mother had
given me a locket with a bit of his hair in it so I could at least have a bit of my grandfather with me.
That evening the whole family (we are a very big family) went to St. Hubert which was my grandfather’s favorite
restaurant. At the end of supper my uncle Ollie asked the waitress if he could take home two of the St. Hubert wine
glasses since it was his deceased father’s favorite restaurant, the waitress said yes, so it wasn’t technically stealing.
(From Sara Goertz (2019), “Last Memories of My Grandfather”)
1. What is the excerpt/topic about?
2. What was highlighted in the excerpt?
3. How did the writer focus on the moment of experience?
4. If you were to rewrite the piece, what changes will you do? Why?

IV. ASSESSMENT
Directions: Be ready to craft your own narrative. This task will be accomplished following three phases.

(PHASE 1) Using the 10 Hacks to Improve your Creative Writing, create a realistic fiction that showcases
characters, setting, and plot that could truly happen in real life. As you write your piece, have a topic, theme,
and technique in mind. Be guided by the following standards:
1. Choose a topic that interests you. 4. Use any of the literary conventions of a short story discussed.
2. Formulate a thesis statement. 5. Ensure that theme and technique are effectively developed in
3. Organize and develop the ideas. your piece.
Rubric
Criteria Indicator Rating
Genre The narrative contains characters, setting, and plot that are very realistic and could truly
happen in everyday life.
Organization The plot is thoroughly developed. The story is interesting and logically organized; there is
clear exposition, rising action, and climax. The story has clear resolution or surprise ending.
Setting The setting is clearly described through vivid sensory language.
Characters Characters are well-developed through dialogue, actions, and thoughts.
Dialogue Dialogues sound realistic and advances the plot.
Conflict The conflict is clearly established, developed, and resolved after a gripping climax.
Point of View Maintains a consistent point of view.
Figures of Speech Uses carefully chosen figurative language to help the reader visualize.
Theme Theme is distinguishable throughout the narrative; the writer employed literary techniques to
and Technique make theme evident.
Grammar There are few or no errors in grammar, usage, mechanics, or spelling.
and Mechanics

(PHASE 2) After writing your piece, have your classmate/peer edit your work based on the standards listed
in the table below. You peer, on the other hand, will edit your work using the same standards.
Standard Description
Idea The narrative contains characters, setting, and plot that are very realistic and could truly happen in
everyday life.
Choice of Literary Literary element chosen is appropriate. Clear focus on the literary element is evident. The main point
Element or idea is elaborated and explained by enough and specific details, descriptions, and reactions.
Setting Clear and logical flow of ideas are evident. Effective use of literary element to express the idea or
topic.
(PHASE 3) After writing your work and editing the work of your peer, be ready to revise your output. To do this,
be guided by the instructions below.
1. Be open-minded. Writers improve their craft by listening to the feedback of other writers. Do not feel bad if your
peer gave a lot of comments.
2. Read the comments before revising your work. Take note of what you should improve, revise or change in your
first draft.
3. If the comments are not clear, feel free to ask your peer about it.
4. Work on improving your draft by making the necessary changes to your work. Research if you see the need for it.
Ask questions.
5. Put yourself in the position of your reader as you revise. If you cannot understand what you have written, chances
are, your readers will also feel the same.
6. Write your revised draft presentably.
7. Finally, be ready to submit your work.

Reference: De Guzman, Joyce T., Creative Nonfiction Quarter 1 – Module 5: Using the Literary Conventions of a Genre in Writing. DepEd, ROV.
connectplus.pasco.k12.fl.us. Bold Action Fiction Story Scoring Guide (pdf). Retrieved from https. // connectplus.pasco.k12.fl.us.com
Lumzy, Kimberly. Realistic Fiction Writing Rubric. Retrieved from https. // teacherspayteachers.com

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Prepared by: RHEA J. DOLLESIN, Teacher III, Sorsogon NHS
Quality Assured by: ANNE E. MANCIA, Assistant Principal II for Academics, Sorsogon NHS
CLEOFE D. ARIOLA, EPS, Sorsogon City