SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL

Learning Module
in
creative NONFICTION
by: JEPTE C. DAGUM

(week 16)
(Week No.12)
LESSON 12
REVISING YOUR COMPOSITIONS
Learning competency/ies: Revise the draft based on desirable qualities of well-
written creative nonfiction

Objectives
This lesson aims to:

a. discover the usage of literary elements in creative nonfiction through mind

mapping;
b. criticize samples of creative nonfiction through peer-debriefing activity; and
c. reflect on the use of creative nonfiction to our day-to-day lives through journal
method.

Review
VIDEO WATCHING OR NOT
Directions:
Watch the video from YouTube. Follow this link:
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSoRzTtwgP4). Or you may actually
read the transcripts of the video below. Connect also the importance of this
videos in writing literary text.

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Full Transcript of the Video
How to write descriptively?
by: Nalo Hopkins (2015)

We read fiction for many reasons. To be entertained, to find out who done it, to travel
to strange, new planets, to be scared, to laugh, to cry, to think, to feel, to be so absorbed that
for a while we forget where we are. So, how about writing fiction?
How do you suck your readers into your stories? With an exciting plot? Maybe.
Fascinating characters? Probably. Beautiful language? Perhaps. "Billie's legs are noodles. The
ends of her hair are poison needles. Her tongue is a bristly sponge, and her eyes are bags of
bleach."
Did that description almost make you feel as queasy as Billie? We grasp that Billie's
legs aren't actually noodles. To Billie, they feel as limp as cooked noodles. It's an implied
comparison, a metaphor.So, why not simply write it like this? "Billie feels nauseated and weak."
Chances are the second description wasn't as vivid to you as the first.
The point of fiction is to cast a spell, a momentary illusion that you are living in the world
of the story. Fiction engages the senses, helps us create vivid mental simulacra of the
experiences the characters are having. Stage and screen engage some of our senses directly.
We see and hear the interactions of the characters and the setting.
But with prose fiction, all you have is static symbols on a contrasting background. If you
describe the story in matter of fact, non-tactile language, the spell risks being a weak one. Your
reader may not get much beyond interpreting the squiggles. She will understand what Billie feels
like, but she won't feel what Billie feels. She'll be reading, not immersed in the world of the story,
discovering the truths of Billie's life at the same time that Billie herself does.
Fiction plays with our senses:taste, smell, touch, hearing, sight, and the sense of
motion. It also plays with our ability to abstract and make complex associations. Look at the
following sentence."The world was ghost-quiet, except for the crack of sails and the burbling of
water against hull." The words, "quiet," "crack," and "burbling," engage the sense of hearing.
Notice that Buckell doesn't use the generic word sound. Each word he chooses evokes a
particular quality of sound. Then, like an artist laying on washes of color to give the sense of
texture to a painting, he adds anoter layer, motion, "the crack of sails," and touch, "the burbling
of water against hull."
Finally, he gives us an abstract connection by linking the word quiet with the word ghost.
Not "quiet as a ghost,"which would put a distancing layer of simile between the reader and the
experience. Instead, Buckell creates the metaphor "ghost-quiet" for an implied, rather than overt,
comparison.
Writers are always told to avoid cliches because there's very little engagement for the
reader in an overused image, such as "red as a rose."But give them, "Love...began on a beach.
It began that day when Jacob saw Anette in her stewed-cherry dress," and their brains engage
in the absorbing task of figuring out what a stewed-cherry dress is like. Suddenly, they're on a
beach about to fall in love. They're experiencing the story at both a visceral and a conceptual
level, meeting the writer halfway in the imaginative play of creating a dynamic world of the
senses.
So when you write, use well-chosen words to engage sound, sight, taste, touch, smell,
and movement. Then create unexpected connotations among your story elements, and set your
readers' brushfire imaginations alight.

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 Pre-assessment
1. Which of the following is not part of how we reveal our characters?
a. direct description
b. action and reaction
c. dialogue
d. setting
2. These refers to the writer’s attitude towards the subject.
a. motif
b. tone
c. diction
d. symbol
3. What type of approach where you use your emotions and feelings?
a. deductive
b. inductive
c. subjective
d. objective
4. It is conveyed by the words use to describe the setting or reflected by the
way the subject feels or the way he or she acts?
a. mood
b. subject
c. event
d. characterization
5. It refers to the logical conclusion of the flow of your narrative or the
development of your ideas.
a. resolution
b. beginning
c. climax
d. denouement

Introduction
Most of us who compose understand revision as an ongoing, even
constant process. There is so much to do after you write your literary piece.
But real revision is more than making a few changes here and there. Real
revision requires that you open yourself up to the possibility that parts of your
text – and even your entire story - might need to be re-thought, and re-written.
Achieving this state of mind is difficult. First, you might be very attached to
what you've written. You may be unwilling to change a word, let alone three
or four paragraphs. Second, there is the matter of time: you sense that the
paper needs major work. Third, you may have difficulty understanding what,

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exactly, is wrong with your paper. Finally, you might simply be sick and tired
of your paper. These processes are important so that your creative
nonfictional text will haves its comprehensibility and has a good use of literary
elements. And those are the aims of this lesson about revising and
understanding the functions of literary elements in writing and reevaluating
our written text.

Content
Viewing CNF thru its Literary Elements

Plot or Plot Structure

Catchy and clever titles have an advantage

Examples:
The Wild Man of Green Swamp by Maxine Hong
The Courage of Turtles b Edward Hoagland

Titles should give the reader a quick idea of what to expect, without
giving away the whole story, (Hildalgo, 2015).

The First Paragraph

Ways of Writing your First Paragraph
• Passage of Vivid Description
• Quotation
• Dialogue
• Little Scene
• Anecdote
• Question
• Striking Statement
• Reference to a current event

The Resolution
• it must have logical conclusion of the flow of your narrative or the
development of your ideas
• bear in mind that the reader should be left with a sense of completion
• you may end by suggesting new problems or asking other questions
Hidalgo (2015) said that the ending does not mean that you need to
answer or resolve the issues that you raised.

Character or Characterization
Ways of Revealing Your Characters
• Direct Description
• Action and Reaction

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 • Other Character’s Opinion
• Dialogue
• Monologue
• Character’s Distinct or Idiosyncratic Behavior

Point of View
Remember
“A good piece of creative nonfiction has a personal voice, a clearly define
point of view, which will reveal itself in the tone, and be presented through
scene, summary and description, as it is in fiction. All strategies are designed
to reach out the readers and draw them again without losing tract of the facts
– (Hidalgo, 2015)”

Tone & Voice

The writer’s attitude towards the subject.

Approach or Angle
Objective
Subjective

Setting & Atmosphere

Setting refers to the place, time and when an event happens.
Atmosphere or mood refers to the elements that evoke certain feelings or
emotions. It is conveyed by the words use to describe the setting or reflected
by the way the subject feels or the way he or she acts.
Self-Check Activities
MINDMAPPING THE CONCEPTS
Directions: Create a mindmap, by synthesizing the components of creative
nonfictional text. Make sure that you include all of the necessary information.

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Your Own Mindmap Here

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Key Concepts
 Viewing of creative nonfictional text could be done through the
combination of the following: catchy quotation, anecdote, question,
striking statement, logical conclusion of the flow,a sense of
completion, and direct description.

Evaluation
Write your own essay concentrating on your life in the senior high
school. Then, compare your work to the literary piece below. Have a list of the
things you notice and you would like to improve in the piece.
Isabelle’s Tongue
by: Anna Journey
I just bought the plum-colored, bisque tongue of a broken, antique Kestner baby doll on the internet. I don’t
know why, exactly. I’m not a collector. I don’t have tables draped in doilies or cabinets glistening with crystal figurines
of cats. I didn’t play with baby dolls as a child. I preferred small, plastic jungle animals. All I know is that as I did research
for a poem, scrolling through online listings for bisque head French dolls, I scooted my swivel chair closer to my
computer screen to stare at the following listing: “Tongue from a damaged antique large Kestner baby doll, marked
with the NO. 16.” The tongue was five dollars. It was plump, an inch long, linked by a mottled black hinge to a little
pancake of flesh-colored bisque, the latter of which had once formed the hard palate inside the now-shattered—and
vanished—doll’s open mouth. On the smooth underside of the tongue, a factory worker had inscribed the number
sixteen. “Am I a freak if I buy an antique doll’s tongue on the internet?” I called out from my office to my husband who
typed in the back bedroom—the former sun parlor—of our Craftsman bungalow. David—also a writer—appeared in
my doorway to scrutinize the image. He flicked his thumbnail through his beard, nodding. “Oh,” he said, “you have to
have it.”
I’ve learned that the J.D. Kestner doll company produced dolls for over ninety years, from the early 1820s to
approximately 1938, in the Waltershausen, Thuringia, region of Germany. This makes my doll’s tongue at least
seventy-four-years-old. I’ve also discovered that, in addition to a mold mark and the phrase, “Made in Germany,”
Kestner designers inscribed their dolls with a number that specified the size of the doll. Thus, my doll’s tongue was
once hinged to a bisque baby’s head sixteen inches in circumference, the approximate skull-size of a child who’s larger
than a newborn but still less than a year old.
In five days, my husband will drive ten minutes to a hospital in Santa Monica to have a vasectomy. “I’m never going to
have children,” I’ve said for sixteen years, since I was a fifteen-year-old girl. “But if I ever did have a kid—in a parallel
universe—I’d name her Isabelle.”
Three days until the vasectomy and my tongue hasn’t yet arrived in the mail. A woman who collects doll parts
has already shipped the package, from her home in Rushville, Indiana. I learn this information by checking the tracking
number courtesy of the USPS. I’ve discovered that some of Rushville’s other notable residents include Wendell Willkie,
the dark horse Republican Party nominee who ran against Roosevelt during the 1940 presidential election, and a high
school student named Tyell Morton, who was arrested by Rushville police last spring, after he left an inflatable sex doll
inside a restroom in his school.
I like to imagine my tongue-sender—whose online username is “katydid22”—lives in a red-brick Victorian
with cream trim, on the quiet and iron-fenced Perkins Street, like the picture of the house I found when I searched for
images of Rushville, Indiana, on the internet. Her name is probably Katy. She may be twenty-two. She may have
inherited the house from her grandmother, who had also collected dolls. Katy may have replaced the rows of porcelain
knobs on her two antique walnut nightstands—one on either side of the bed—with small, bisque doll heads, their necks
screwed to the right so those pupiled blue irises point toward the doorway. This way, Katy’s guardians keep watch
while she sleeps.
Her name is Kathy—with a “th”—says the first class mailing label. Kathy J. Williams, from Rushville. I knife
open the tiny cardboard box, unwind the tongue from its layer of rose-pink bubble wrap, and sit the mock-muscle on
top of my desk. If I press down on the tongue with my fingertip and then let go, the piece flaps back up, like a piano’s
sustain pedal. I leave the object on top of my desk for months, unsure about how to display it. Earnest and spare within
a bell jar? Ironic in a bright, ceramic dish of butterscotch candies? Arty in a cabinet, sat between a cast-brass
hummingbird skull and a holographic set of illustrated folk myths from the Museum of Jurassic Technology?

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 I went through a phase in childhood where I named everything that came into my possession Charlie, no
matter the thing’s species or distinguishable sex: the black-and-white female rescue cat with the ripped ear; the
Chinese fire belly newt I ultimately freed (irresponsibly) in my neighbors’ creek; the pet rock with the glued-on, wobbly
eyes; the stuffed golden lab; the potted aloe. “Have you seen Charlie?” I’d ask my mother, breathlessly, as she
suppressed a smile and wiped her hands on a blue dishtowel looped to the fridge. “Which one?”
I’ve wondered why I waited so long to use “Isabelle,” why I finally bestowed the name on an impulse buy, a
random fragment. Why did I give away my prized name to a partial object, the rest of it crumbled out there—someplace?
Even the aloe was whole. Even the pet rock had a face.
I don’t remember exactly when I threw the tongue away. I guess I couldn’t settle on a way to display it. The
tongue had become part of my desk’s clutter: four different kinds of post-it notes (bird-printed, leaf-stamped, plain
yellow, monogrammed with my full name in red); a collaged strata of scrawled poem-ideas, to-do lists, and reminders;
stacks of books—Rachel Poliquin’s Taxidermy and the Culture of Longing—which I keep meaning to finish—Beckian
Fritz Goldberg’s searing lyrics in Reliquary Fever: New and Selected Poems, a monograph of Francesca Woodman’s
disturbing self-portraits of the photographer crawling nude through the slot in a gravestone or lying sideways near a
dead eel. I didn’t have room for a tongue that sat here for a year—mute, refusing to speak.
Before popping a five-strip of Mad Hatters to trigger an LSD trip, when I was seventeen, I carefully drew an
upper lip and pair of cartoon eyes on the side of my right pointer finger, in blue ink, and then sketched a lower lip on
the top of my thumb, between its lower and middle knuckles. If I braced my thumb-tip against my pointer’s underside
and wiggled my thumb, the drawn-on lips lined up to form a mouth that moved, as if my hand now had a face that could
talk. I hoped the face would magically snap to sentience during my acid trip, so I could have wild conversations with it
at the Grateful Dead-themed music festival in Brandywine, Maryland, where I was camping with friends for three days.
“It’s family friendly, see?” I’d told my mother, showing her the flyer with a picture of musical notes floating above a
rainbow over a tent-covered field and the words, “Dogs and children welcome.”
Are you and David going to have children?” my friend Sarah asked me as we walked back from a coffee
shop on the Venice boardwalk about a week after I’d eloped. Sarah, a Montana-born third-wave feminist who’d met
her partner at a sweat lodge in the desert outside Phoenix, had two kids and the longest hair I’d seen outside the
parking lot of a Phish concert. I’ve found that if I answer too quickly in the negative when someone inquires about my
reproductive plans, I risk seeming like a fairy tale villain who’d sooner make a child-stew than a child’s bed. “No,” I said
simply, after a casual, non-child-hating pause. “I understand completely,” she said, nodding.
As the acid began to kick in, my friends and I had positioned ourselves in a clump on a purple batik blanket
on the grass next to our four-person tent. “It’s a magic carpet,” my friend John declared in a conspiratorial whisper.
The rest of us agreed, and began to sway from side to side, as if the blanket were flying and rippling around Wilmer’s
Park, above the heads of people playing didgeridoos or hula hooping before that night’s music acts started up. “Hey,”
my friend Erin said, looking at my hand, “is it talking yet?” I stopped swaying and stared down at the face I’d drawn.
The blue ink stood out in an icy, nearly vibrating harshness on my pale, freckled fingers. The cartoon mouth had taking
on a mocking, sinister pout as if to imply, “Did you really believe I could speak without a tongue?” I spit a long drool-
drip of saliva across the lips and eyes and smeared the ink with my other thumb, until the place where the face once
was became a fraying, cobalt stain.
I’ve begun to wonder if Kathy read the Rushville paper the day Tyell Morton’s arrest was announced, if she
found his propping an inflatable sex doll in one of his high school’s restrooms offensive or worthy of an arrest. “Now
they’re arresting people for making statements with dolls?” she might wonder. Maybe she isn’t as conventional as her
Indiana grandmother, Mabel. Maybe, late one night, she drove to the police precinct and left a pile of bisque babies’
bottoms on the front step, their anatomically incorrect, anus-less buttocks tipped up toward the Midwestern dusk.
Wouldn’t a woman who sells old doll parts for a living have to have a sense of humor? Or maybe she’s despairing,
rage-filled. Maybe she couldn’t conceive all those nights trying between the cornfields and so sells smashed-up dolls
to strangers. Maybe they wouldn’t speak back to her either and she no longer wanted to wait.
Rushville’s Wendell Willkie—the dark horse Republican Party nominee in 1940. I like the term “dark horse.”
It seems too poetic for use in political jargon. It comes from horseracing, actually. It means “a little-known person or
thing who emerges to prominence.” Dark horse doll-lady Kathy. Dark horse prankster Tyell. Dark horse sex doll swelled
to human-size in the high school restroom. Dark horse absurd arrest. Dark horse Wendell dead just four years after
running for president. Dark horse heart attack at the end of his phantom first term. Dark horse sperm cinched off in the
infamous operation. Dark horse tongue I named and threw away. Dark horse Isabelle. Dark horse face. A whole dark
horse year, another, as they race.

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 Enrichment Activities

3 2 1 TAKEAWAYS

Directions: List down three important things you learn from this topic, two
things you will share to your friend, and one thing that you would like to
improve as author of creative nonfictional works.

3 Things You Learn

___________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________

2 Things You Will Share

___________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________

1 Thing You Will Improve

___________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________

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 Bibliography
Books
Solmerano, E.T. et. al (2017). Creative Nonfiction. Fastbooks Educational
Supply. Sampaloc, Manila, Philippines.

Websites
Journey, A. (2013). Isabelle’s Tongue. Retrieved from:
http://32poems.com/prose/weekly-prose-feature-two-lyric-essays-by-anna-
journey/. Retrieval Date: June 26, 2020

Kilpatrick K.L. (2014). Why Writing is Important. Retrieved from:

https://public.district196.org/District/CurriculumAssessment/Curr-
Literacy/WhyIsWritingImportant.pdf. Retrieval Date: June 26, 2020

Video
Hopkinson, A. (2015). How To Write Descriptively. Youtube video. Website:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSoRzTtwgP4

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