Narrative design
Dialogue with Dahlia de la Cerda
Storyteller, activist and philosopher. She has worked as an international news editor and as a seller of Avon, black roses on the street and second-hand clothes in a flea market. Writer of novels, essays and columns, she helps others at Morras Help Morras.
Q: How is writing approached as a design process?
It's very diverse. I've heard many writers say that they dive into writing without any prior planning, but I structure everything. I easily spend more time designing a book than writing it. For "Medea me cantó un corrido", my latest book, I spent about 6 to 8 months structuring it in my head, even at the gym I was thinking and designing my characters. I thought about how Medea would be if she came to Mexico, and I imagined her as an angry artist because the guy who told her he loved her had lied to her. I also designed her appearance and how she would dress. I decided to give her African braids, big earrings, and long nails. For each of my characters, I design how they look, what their personalities are like, what are the things they like, how they speak, and what are their political and ethical beliefs.
The same thing happens with the story, I even work based on an outline. I start with an idea: the story of a girl who has an abortion because her boyfriend is missing. From the idea, I start developing the details. I think about who this girl is, what her name is, where she lives, and who her mother is. Then I build the outline of how things will happen, what is the girl doing, how she aborts, who helps her, what her past is like, and what her life is like now. And then for each of these things, I start designing: I describe the neighborhood she lives in, her family life, and her entire narrative world. For me, the writing process is a process of designing, of a lot of thinking and structuring.
Most of the time, the problem of facing a blank page is that we don't have a structure. We think we need to be inspired to write, but the reality is that we need to know how to structure our ideas. Inspiration is, as a rapper says, for beginners. What we need to know is how to structure an idea and then tune this idea: we choose the narrator, the perspective, and the narrative voice. I also think it's important to design a balance between style and substance, where the texts are well-written, but the anecdotes are polished. I always try to work on the substance first to have the story, the characters, and their motivations clear. We can find a text that is excellently written but has no anecdote, and if it doesn't convey anything, the form is not enough.
Q: Are designing and writing political acts?
I believe that translating my political stances and concerns into literature involves design. I have my political positions, and they are very clear to me. For example, I am anti-racist, I am concerned about racism in society, but to convey that into literature, I have to design how to make my words resonate. If I write in a literary text "racism sucks and shouldn't exist," it sounds like a pamphlet and it sounds bad. So, I have to design how I am going to say the same thing through a story, whether my character is saying it, or all the things that happen to this character make us reflect that we live in a racist country and it's not cool. To talk about gentrification, maybe I take the story of a family from a popular neighborhood1 who are evicted from their family home to build an apartment building, as is happening a lot in Aguascalientes. I am interested in making certain issues visible, and storytelling allows me to do that.
The fact that only certain stories or certain themes are considered literary material is very classist, very racist, and very closed-minded. Recently, I conducted an autobiography workshop for women in a prison, but it was actually an excuse to give them a space of active listening, so they could tell their life stories without being judged. As we were talking there, we realized that perfectly all the stories they told could be literary material, all they lacked was to adapt them into a literary model. One of them, which impacted me the most, was a classic love story of girl meets boy. The girl stole because she had a problematic drug use, and she met the boy because he bought the stolen goods from her, until one day he saved her from the police. Then she got into trouble with the law and ended up in prison, but ten years later, he goes to see her every visit day, even though it takes him two hours to get there. The only thing missing from this story is the design of a narrative structure that is accepted, not so much in the canon, but that has the necessary elements required to tell a story.
Anyone can write and dedicate themselves to literature. Especially when we talk about autofiction, autobiography, and testimony, which are also literary genres, anyone can do it. We all have stories to tell.
1 Translator note: Dahlia uses “barrio” to refer to a specific form of popular neighborhood, which in Spanish describes older areas within a city with a strong cultural identity, rooted history and sense of community. Barrios are usually organized around characteristics such as ethnicity, social class, or economic activity. The equivalent in English to what she implies is “hood”, a term that is used later in this text.
Meme to announce the "narrative workshop for beginners," more information at dahliadelacerda.com.mx. Courtesy Dahlia de la Cerda.
Q: Where are the alternative narratives designed?
Throughout all peripheral and subaltern spaces, alternative forms of design have always existed. For example, on the wall of my rooftop, there are broken glass pieces used as a security measure to prevent intruders from jumping into the house. There are other aesthetics specific to peripheral contexts; in most hoods, you'll find a Virgin of Guadalupe on street corners, or murals to honor those from the hood who have passed away, or even sneakers hanging from power lines, and all these are ways to customize the streets and give them an identity.
Since ancient times, there have been alternative forms to academia, to the hegemonic, to what is known as art, or to the legitimized crafts. And from literature, I believe that many forms of resistance have gradually emerged, mainly related to speaking about one's own experience.
In recent days, I have been interviewing female reggaeton artists, and I was surprised that three of them told me they wanted to be writers. In their context, there were no writers, but there were rappers, so they associated writing with rap and began to develop the craft of writing to translate it into music. This, of course, is designing; integrating rhymes to a beat, or vice versa, crafting rhymes for a beat, is designing. Behind all these genres or forms of expression that we see as marginal, such as graffiti, rap, reggaeton, or cumbiaton, there is design and structure. Many times, these designs are not within the canons of what we understand as beautiful, aesthetic, or correct. But alternative aesthetics exist and resist in the hoods, and fortunately they are becoming more normal.