Duende: Why Flamenco and Creative Writing Have Everything in Common
Are we discounting duende in favour of marketing and losing our audience in the process?
Seville, Spain is one of my favourite cities. It’s famous for tapas, oranges, Moorish architecture, and being the birthplace of flamenco. The dance is really something else, and if you get the chance to see a performance in person, you should. Perhaps its unique essence is why the spanish word ‘duende’ was coined. Duende refers to a heightened state of expression, emotion, connection, and authenticity often associated with flamenco. It’s an intense, almost spiritual or mystical force, that ignites inspiration and expression. In english, the closest word we have is passion, although that doesn’t quite seem to do justice.
Duende doesn’t only apply to flamenco. The word can be used when describing a particularly impassioned musician or theatrical performer, or any other intensity connected or emotionally moving work of creative expression. I’d say you could also use it to describe writing, despite not necessarily bearing witness to an author’s duende in their creative process, but as readers we certainly feel and connect to it on the page.
As a writer, there is plenty of talk about inspiration, finding or losing one’s passion, and of the well known writer's block. Some would say they’d stop writing if they lost their passion, while others consider it work like they’ve a job to do and write like machines, clawing through blocks to meet a deadline or designated word count. And while there will always be deadlines that have to be met regardless of approach, I’d prefer to tackle this subject from a difference perspective. Instead of waiting for inspiration or forcing the words, why don’t we consider ways to reignite passion. Once in creative flow, the words come easier, so why not work to cultivate that instead of taking a sort of flight or fight mentality to it?
I don’t know if the Spanish believe that duende can be cultivated. It seems to be more of a quality that is evoked or inspired, and is sometimes associated with magical or mythical beings. Duende also means something akin to a pixie or an imp in Spanish folklore. Yet when it comes to passion and inspiration, artists have been known to do some unusual things to ignite that spark. I’d heard of everything from talking hours-long aimless walks, to having multiple showers a day, to keeping altars, using certain scents, and free-journaling to break through a creative block. And perhaps, in a way, these acts could be seen as types of rituals to call in the muses, or pixies if you like. I’m sure science would equate them to forms of getting out of one’s way, or shifting our body’s energy and mental state to allow a more creative thought process. For me, I don’t know. I kind of like the idea of magical creative beings whispering inspiring messages in our ears. Perhaps that’s why I’m a creative writer and not a scientist.
So when’s the last time you experienced duende? If not as a creative, then as a recipient, either in an audience or as a reader or listener? The thing is, I can think of these experiences, but they seem fewer and far between than they used to. As a creative, I often turn to things made ten or twenty years ago for inspiration. Perhaps it’s my age, my sense of appreciation, nostalgia, or something else drawing me to the past. Or perhaps it’s that the current zeitgeist isn’t that inspired. As someone who’s old enough to have worked through that threshold of pre and post social media influence, I do see a difference.
Of course there is the science behind social media and dopamine disregulation, which does indeed affect creativity and attention span. However, there’s also the rise of influencers, which relies directly on fame, marketing, and followers as currency as opposed to any kind of passion, connection, authenticity, or duende. It’s about selling something, not about having a deeply inspired and connected experience. After all, there is very low commitment or engagement required to press a ‘like’ on something. So when selling books primarily moves to places like TikTok’s #booktok phenomenon, does the medium in which we discover new art influence a reader’s experience or a writer’s creative process?
The short answer is: It doesn’t have to, but more often it does. Toktok, and particularly the booktok side of things is dominated by young people, particularly young women. Therefore a certain type of novel is going to appeal in the booktok world. This is really nothing new in itself. Think about how much influence Oprah’s Book Club had to single handedly make an entire debut author’s career. The difference was that if you didn’t share Oprah’s taste, there were other prominent book clubs, and of course the New York Times and USA Today book lists. Yes, there’s lot of controversy to discuss when talking about bestseller lists, but what I’m saying is that there wasn’t one space dominating book marketing prior to say, 2020ish. Also, physical book stores were more prevalent, book critics were those with a load of experience, education and earned respect as opposed to those with a large online following, and in-person book launches and tours were much more of a ‘thing’.
Sure, you can argue that plenty of celebrity book clubs still exit today to offer alternatives to the booktok picks, but how much difference is there really? I’m pretty sure Daisy Jones and the Six was on just about every influencer and celebrity’s top books list of 2020. For the record, I absolutely love this book, but it has an interesting path to propelling its author, Taylor Jenkins Reid, to superstardom. Basically, she had written a few books that hadn’t hit the ‘big time’, keeping her as a mid list author. Unhappy with that status, she switched agents for Daisy Jones and the Six, and got much more publicity from her publisher. However, right around this time, Booktok was just starting and influencers not only took note of Daisy Jones, but also of Reid’s earlier work, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. (Another fantastic read, by the way.) The older book actually became a bigger booktok hit, propelling a novel from the author’s backlist onto the bestseller charts!
All of this sounds great, right? Like we should be praising booktok for helping authors in this way, shouldn’t we? Well, not necessarily. Publishers took note of a number of booktok’s early picks propelling backlist novels back onto the charts, and everyone probably had dollar signs in their eyes. Publishing houses themselves began cutting traditional forms of marketing, opting for the free publicity of booktok campaigns. This, in turn, created a higher acquisitions of books suitable for, and desirable to, a booktok audience, and in turn again created writers who moulded their own writing style to be most palatable to that same audience. Forget duende, this is about marketing.
The thing we are all ignoring is that both of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s biggest books were written before booktok was a thing. They may have gone viral there, but they were not written for it. The same is true of Emily Henry, another great author who shot to stardom on booktok, and yet I’d personally say her debut, Beach Read, (again written before booktok) was her best. There seems to be an active shift away from the qualities of duende — authenticity, passion, inspiration, deep emotion, and connectivity — to a more cookie cutter look and hook to go viral on social media.
The same thing happens in other creative mediums as well, with television shows looking for that viral moment that might trend for a day, as opposed to actually entering the zeitgeist of the moment (think SNL now vs years ago), instead of moving its audience so much that it becomes a world-of-mouth must-see phenomenon. (More like Ted Lasso).
There are exceptions to the trends. (Ted Lasso was one, for example). In books, let’s look at Fredrik Backman. He’s one of my favourite authors. His latest release, titled My Friends, just hit number one in Canada in less than a week, and I’ve seen more than one impassioned post from someone having just finished his book and feeling so moved they needed to talk about it. He’s a modern superstar when it comes to authors these days, but he certainly doesn’t fit the booktok mould. He’s a middle aged Swedish man, a self-described introvert, who occasionally uses social media and mostly posts about his dog. His books are not close perspective, twenty-something female protagonist-led, romcoms or romantasy (the specialties of the booktok world), and instead feature varied characters of all ages, voices, and perspective. They’re sometimes quirky, and often funny, but they always have a lot of heart. There is movement of feeling, there’s connection with the reader, and, according to Backman, he pours his soul into his writing. In fact, he shared that while writing his latest book, he considered retiring and often stopped writing when he felt he couldn’t go on. He wrote about the book: “If you feel anything while reading this story it’s because I left everything I had in there.” And it seems it’s really resonating with readers. If that isn’t duende, I don’t know what is.
With the favourite ‘types’ of the booktok word becoming overcrowded, and with competition that’s cookie cutter rather than original, will novels showcasing this duende type of connection and emotional resonance eventually be the ones to cut through the social media noise and become bestsellers? It’s already happening, but here’s hoping for more of it.
When I create, just as when I consume books, I want to feel something. I want that messy, passionate, magical, emotional connection that somehow feels both otherworldly and intrinsically human. I want to feel inspired, and I want to be moved. Perhaps it’s like that old saying, people won’t remember what you did, but they will remember how you made them feel.
So when it comes to a bold, extroverted flamenco performance, and the quiet, introverted practice of crafting a good novel, know that they have more in common than first meets the eye. There is an intensity and passion to both, deep connection to an audience, and most certainly a little bit of magic.
