The Art of Crafting a Novel: In Conversation with Cleyvis Natera
Cleyvis Natera’s upcoming sophomore novel, The Grand Paloma Resort (Penguin Random House, 2025) follows two sisters in the behind the scenes of a luxurious resort. As a normal day at work spirals into a climatic week,The Grand Paloma Resort offers a complex story of social class, family, community, that reveals secrets that question the real cost of luxury.
Natera sat down with Camilla Marchese Gonzalez to share the writing process and inspiration behind her latest novel.
What sparked the idea to write this book?
The point of inspiration for The Grand Paloma Resort was kind of two-fold. The first source of inspiration is the fact that I’m from the Dominican Republic, and I wanted to write about the place where I was born. I left the Dominican Republic when I was 10 years old. Since then, anytime I go back, I always feel this love for the earth, for the land itself. On the other hand, I also feel a slight distance from it, because I’m now from somewhere else too. It makes me appreciate the place in a different way but also all the kinds of social issues that exist. Especially being an immigrant in the United States, I think there’s something really interesting that happens when you’re here, that it gives you a positionality to both understand what it means to be from a place and also what it means to be in a place that can be hostile to you.
I was really interested in thinking about class and social mobility. What it means within a constructed reality such as in a resort. It’s a really fascinating setting, so I wanted to create this place where I could explore a lot of the questions that I’m concerned about.
The second point of inspiration for me has to do with Edwidge Danticat’s book, The Farming of Bones. I first learned about the massacre of Haitians in the Dominican Republic that took place in 1937, when I read the book in my early twenties. As I was thinking about writing a book that was set in the Dominican Republic, I was thinking about literature, and the way that literature can engage in a dialogue with history. I first learned about this huge historical event, not through family members, nor school, but through this book. Then every time I went back to the Dominican Republic, I could see both the country and Dominicans of Haitian descent, or migrants who are working there, through a very different lens that was only available to me after reading The Farming of Bones.
I want to have this book be in conversation with Danticat’s, while also being sequential to it. I found my own little nugget of history that I was interested in animating in this novel and incorporated it into the plot. Part of it was very personal, and another part of the inspiration was an intellectual and artistic exploration.
The novel tackles topics of class disparity, both in social dynamics but also in physical locations. Could you talk a little about how you dissected these concepts in the novel?
I was thinking a lot about the exploitation of a place in the context of who capitalizes and gets to benefit from the beautiful setting, especially in the Caribbean. Most of the time people that benefit are big conglomerates or corporations. There’s very little social mobility for people that actually work in resorts. That was one thing that I was really interested in exploring.For me, it was just really important to think about place, and in this case I chose the resort, as a stand-in for the hierarchy in society .I really love to write setting and the resort animates many of the characters’ desires and many of the plot points in the book. It was fun to write about this location and show how beautiful it is but simultaneously explore what is happening there.
The novel is written in the span of seven days, what was the decision behind this timeline?
I also wanted to explore this idea of a resort, in terms of structure, because I wanted to constrain the story to seven days. I wanted the book itself to feel like an escape. The book follows two sisters who work at the resort, but there are other perspectives that come in, and all of them are people who are either guests at the hotel or people that used to work in the hotel.
I definitely wanted to use a week as the structure since I started drafting this story. I came into the idea of writing about the resort with this constraint. It’s really interesting because my editor didn’t think it was enough time for characters to transform and have this kind of journey. And I was like, challenge accepted. Like, watch me do it, you know? [laughs]
What brings me to novels and what brings me to fiction, is this position to witness something, an experience that happens to a character that changes them forever. Having a front view into the characters’ lives makes for compelling and really moving fiction. For me, that was what I wanted to accomplish and explore in those seven days.
The seven day timeline also creates a sense of urgency. It was really important for me that the reader feels like they are doing some kind of labor, inhabiting that mind space of the characters that are all workers. I used to work as a cashier in a supermarket and I worked cleaning dishes and cleaning dorms when I was in college. There’s something that happens working in a service-oriented job. Once you get there, the clock doesn’t stop. You know, it’s like, go, go, go, go. I wanted to create this visual experience for the reader, where they felt this propulsion, but also the stress, and dread.
Was there anything that surprised you about your characters or your writing as you developed the novel?
I was really surprised by my protagonist, Laura. The book follows two sisters. Laura is the eldest, she is a manager in this resort, and she’s the employee that has reached the highest level as a local. Her sister, Elena, is a babysitter, and she’s going through a very difficult time. She’s seventeen years old, she’s just a party animal, doing drugs, and not taking her job very seriously. Laura decides to teach her sister a lesson by pretending that when she neglects one of the tourist children, that the child falls ill and that that child dies.
I was thinking a lot about that kind of setup for unraveling the plot. Elena makes certain decisions that put local girls at risk, and Laura’s trying to clean up this mess while realizing that a lot of what has happened is because of her initial idea. What was really surprising to me was how many terrible choices these characters make. I mean, it’s kind of delicious, you know, when you’re writing a book. Everybody’s kind of behaving badly. For me, it was fascinating to follow a protagonist who has so much heart but a very pessimistic outlook. It was really interesting to craft a character who becomes an antagonist to herself.
The other thing that was really important was to interview a lot of people who work in hotels. I did this during the revision stage of the book, when I was in the Dominican Republic last summer. I interviewed Dominicans of Haitian descent and Dominican laborers because I wanted the social and cultural situations to be animated in the book. Those conversations surprised me and I think they helped give some emotional truth to my characters that I don’t think I would have had if I hadn’t had those conversations.
You mentioned how certain conversations inspired changes during revision. Can you walk us through your overall revision process, and how you knew the novel was ready for publication?
For this second book, my process was completely different than my first book. I wrote my first book over the course of a decade and by the time that I sold the book, it had been completely written and revised many times over. By the time I found an agent, I had the whole book.
For my second book, we actually sold this novel as a proposal, so I hadn’t finished the book when I sold it. The fact that I was writing under a contract really changed my writing process. First, because I started writing this book as short stories. Then when my agent and I started talking about it, I started working on the outline of the book. During this process, my agent and I made the decision to use a conventional novel structure, since it served the story better. I started writing it, and the book had a mind of its own. It went in a very different direction, adding a character I never intended to write, adding the perspective of a tourist, etc. This is where the book wanted to go, so I think one of the things that I learned is that I needed to trust where it was heading. I wasn’t going to compromise on the quality of the book, because I was writing it under very different circumstances. It was a satisfying experience to see the writing process work with a deadline.
You mentioned that your writing process for this novel differed from Neruda on the Park. I’m curious—what was it like to explore and dissect social relations within the Dominican diaspora in New York, compared to setting the story on the island?
I love this question. To be honest with you, I feel like this book felt more challenging in terms of writing these characters, because the characters’ identities were very far from mine. I should say that my first book is about a mother and a daughter. They’re both immigrants. They both came to the United States from the Dominican Republic. The daughter migrated when she was a child, which is very aligned with my experience, and there were a lot of points of connection for me with that character. For The Grand Paloma Resort there was almost more freedom in the fact that the connection to my identity, or as a person, was more tenuous. I think the core of these characters had to do with what motivated them and what were their desires. Animating these desires and infusing the plot of the book with the, rooted the actions. I was a lot more aware of constructing the story as I was writing it, and constructing characters.
It’s going to be really interesting when people start reading the book, to see if they can tell the difference. For me, it also feels a little more reassuring to be like, “oh, you could reach for a character whose lived reality is really different from your own.”
The depth and profundity to those kinds of choices comes from becoming really informed. I just want to acknowledge that I did do a lot of research and a lot of interviews in order to really understand what it’s like to work in these kinds of environments, and the kind of pressures that people feel.
To wrap up our conversation, are you working on any upcoming projects—and if so, could you give us a sneak peek?
I’m really obsessed with thinking about work and what it does to the family unit, what work does to the individual, and so that’s part of the reason why I feel like I could write about a different Grand Paloma Resort. You learn in this first book that it’s a global brand, and there are hotels all over the world. So, I feel like I could write a Paloma book for the rest of my life. It’s such a ripe kind of place to write about work and explore relationships, and the way that work impinges or empowers us. I’m excited to explore that as I’m spending this summer digging into this new book.
Cleyvis Natera is the author of Neruda on the Park. She was born in the Dominican Republic, migrated to the United States at ten years old, and grew up in New York City. She holds a BA from Skidmore College and a MFA from New York University. Her writing has won awards and fellowships from the International Latino Book Awards, PEN America, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Kenyon Review’s Writers Workshops, the Vermont Studio Center, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, Rowland Writers Retreat, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is currently a Fulbright Specialist. The Grand Paloma Resort is her second novel.
This interview series is produced by Camilla Marchese Gonzalez.