METRO MANILA COLLEGE

U-Site Brgy. Kaligayahan, Novaliches, Quezon City

BASIC EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
Senior High School (Grade 11)

CREATIVE
NONFICTION THE
LITERARY ESSAY

Prepared by Ms. Jessa Mae Gemilla, LPT

Ms. Jean Carla Leonor
In this module, the students are
expected to:
• Clearly and coherently uses multiple elements
conventionally identified with a genre for a written
output

• Ensure quality in every task

• Do a close reading of creative nonfictional texts

• Identify the fictional elements in the texts

 The most successful piece of creative non fiction are rich details. Bare facts are
never enough. They need to be flesh out: they need to be humanized. But
beside giving information, details serve other purpose. Detail should be
accurate and informative first. And then must be suggestive or evocative. The
right details arouse emotion, evoke memories, help to produce the right
response to your reader. Details are extremely important in evoking a sense of
time and place. It must evoke a period as well as location. Descriptive details
are of particular importance for travel writing, the point of which is, to begin
with, to literary transport the reader to the place to which the traveler has been.
- Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo

SETTING
Setting refers to the place and time and where and when an events happen. In
fiction, you can have a very realistic setting like a city ,town, street or other places
that the readers are familiar with such as crowded shopping mall, an old mansion,
a dirty classroom , a dark forest and an abandoned house. The creative
nonfiction writers has no recourse but to stick to places that actually exist. You
are not allowed to invent places or locales to make your narrative interesting. The
readers of creative nonfiction must be taken to the places where the events
actually happened. Creative nonfiction becomes more realistic if you are able to
incorporate the physical, sociological, and psychological environment in depicting
setting.

ATMOSPHERE
ATMOSPHERE or mood in creative nonfiction is the element that evokes
certain feeling or emotion. It is conveyed by the words use to describe the setting
or reflected by the way your subject speaks or in the way he or she acts.
 Some effective examples:
“ I stood like one bewitched, I drank it in , in a speechless rapture. The world was new to me, and I had
never seen anything like thins at home. But as I have said, a day came when I began to cease from nothing
the glories and the charm which the moon and the sun and the twilight wrought upon the river’s face;
another day come when I ceased altogether to note them. Then, if what sunset scene had been repeated, I
should have looked upon it without rapture, and should have commented upon it, inwardly after this
fashion: “ this sun means we are going to have the wind tomorrow; that floating log means that the river is
rising, small thinks to it; that slanting mark on the water refers to a bluff reef which is going to kill
somebody’s steamboat one of these nights, if it is keep s on stretching out like that; those tumbling ‘boils’
shows a dissolving bar and a changing channel there ; the lines and circles in the slick water over yonder are
a warning that the troublesome place is shoaling up dangerously; that silver streak in the shadow of the
forest is the ‘break’ from a new snag, and he has located himself in the very best place he could have found
to fish for steamboats; that tall dead tree, with a single living branch, is not going last long, and then how is a
body ever going to get through this blind place at night without the friendly old landmark? “
“Two View of the Mississippi,” Mark Twain

The year was 1962, the place was Toronto. It was summer, and I was faced with the necessity of earning
the difference between my scholarship for the next year and what it would cost me to live. The job was in
the process of being torn down, but at that time it was a clean, well-lighted place, with booths along one
side and a counter—possibly marble—down the other. The booths were served by a waitressing pro who
lipsticked outside the lines and who thought I was a mutant. My job would be serving things at the
counter—coffee I would pour, toast I would create from bread, milkshake I would whip up in the
obstetrical stainless-steel device provided.(“Easy as pie,” I was told). I would also be running the
customers’ money through the cash register—an opaque machine with buttons to be pushed, little drawers
that shot in and out, and a neurotic system of locks.
“ First Job, Waitressing” from Writing with Intent, Margaret Atwood

WRITING TIPS

 Your readers would like to see the exact place that you are describing in your text by
providing them a clear description.

 Taking your readers in a place means you make them see everything through your eyes.
You are guiding them through visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile and thermal
imagery.

 Avoid making general statements. Provide details such as your first impressions of the
place, why you had a wonderful time, the people you met and how they made your stay in
that place exciting and memorable.
TASK1: EXPLORATORY ACTIVITY
On your way to school each day, you probably do not take notice
of your environment or the things in the streets you pass by because you are
thinking of school work. In this activity, you are encouraged to take time to
examine your street, neighborhood, the people and the houses you see until
you arrive in school. Whether you commute daily or brought to school in a
car or school bus, the guide question below will help you see your daily
routine in different light.
TASK2: Let’s do this!
After reading the text Baguio by Cristina Pantoja- Hidalgo, answer the
following questions.

1. How did the writer describe in the first paragraph of the essay her memory of going
to Baguio?

2. What are some of the memorable images of Baguio that are found in the essay?

3. What are some of the things that the writer and her family did in Baguio?

4. How would you describe the mood or atmosphere of the essay?

TASK3: WRITING EXERCISE
“How I spent my vacation” is probably the most popular and corniest title of an essay
student write inside the classroom. Student have written about it many times from
elementary to junior high school and the tendency is to write about the same things over
and over again. It is about time to reinvent it and to make it more timely and interesting

First Paragraph. Where did you spend your vacation last summer? Who were
with you ? Where did you stay? Was it your first time to visit the place? What
do you think of the place ? What were the place you visited?
Second Paragraph. What were the good things you remember about the vacation?
Did you dislike anything about the trip and the vacation? What were they?

Third Paragraph. If you were to relive your summer vacation, what changes
would you make ?
Last Paragraph. What is your dream summer vacation? Where do you want
to go ? Who do you want to take with you in this dream vacation ?

What activities do you want to engage in which you haven’t done yet in
your previous vacation? Do you think this is possible? What do your parents
think about it ?