Academia de San Lorenzo Dema-ala Inc.

Tialo, Sto. Cristo, City of San Jose del Monte, Bulacan

LESSON #4
Subject: Creative Writing
Name: ________________________________________
Teacher: Mrs. Mary Grace A. Castellon

LEARNING CONTENT: Fiction: Plot and Conflict

REFERENCE/S: DIWA Senior High School Series, internet
LEARNING TARGET
1.1. Identify the various elements, techniques, and literary devices in fiction.
1.2. Create conflicts and inject tension in my story
1.3. Outline my own story plot.
LEARNING CONCEPT
Story vs. Plot
Literature like the other arts, is the creation of order out of chaos – the creation of meaning and
structure out of the pandemonium and confusion that is called real-life.
In Aspects of the Novel, E.M. (for Edward Morgan) Forster defined story as “the chronological
telling of events,” and the plot as “the cause and effect arrangement.”
He gave the now famous examples:
 The king died and the queen died.
 The king died and the queen died of grief.

The first is a story because it tells a series of events in their chronological order, while the second is a
plot because it tells a series of events in a causal and logical structure that connects the events to
reveal their dramatic, thematic, and emotional significance.

Dramatic Structure
Aristoteles (384-322 BCE) in his Poetics, said that a whole is what has a beginning and middle and
end or technically, the protasis, epitasis and catastrophe.
Now, German novelist playwright Gustav Freytag (1816-1895) studied ancient Greeks and
Shakespeare. he made the so-called Freytag’s Pyramid which says that the plot of the story must
consist of five parts: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and resolution (also known
as denouement or catastrophe)
Types of Plots
1. LINEAR PLOTS - Where events are constructed logically and not by coincidence.

2. EPISODIC PLOTS- In which short events are linked to one another by common characters,
places, or a unified theme but are held apart by their individual plot, purpose, and subtext.

3. CUMULATIVE PLOTS - In which events are repeated with one new aspect added with each
repetition.

4. CIRCULAR PLOTS - In which the characters in the story end up in the same place (or at least,
a similar place) that they were at the beginning of the story.

5. PLOTLESS PLOTS - Wherein narratives are written without traditionally recognizable plots
and yet still evoke in you a feeling that you are going somewhere when you read them.

Big Four Conflicts

1. MAN AGAINST MAN CONFLICT - Wherein the characters are fighting against each other.

2. MAN AGAINST SOCIETY CONFLICT - Wherein the character stands up against man-made
institutions and social rules, and is forced to make moral choices.

3. MAN AGAINST NATURE CONFLICT - Wherein the character is fighting against animals, or the forces
of nature such as a storm or even the sea.

4. MAN AGAINST SELF CONFLICT - Wherein the struggle is internal, and the character must overcome
his or her own nature and make a choice between two or more paths.

Mrs. Mary Grace A. Castellon

Prepared by