Tanuj Solanki is the Founder of Bombay Literary Magazine and the author of Diwali in Muzaffarnagar, a Short Story Collection which earned him the highly prestigious Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar in 2019. But before that his debut novel; Neon Noon, was Longlisted for the Tata Literature Live! First Book Award in Fiction category in 2016. His latest novel, The Machine is Learning, was Longlisted for the JCB Prize for Literature 2020.
In an Exclusive Interview with Nitish Raj; Editor-in-Chief, the acclaimed author talks about his writing journey along with the various aspects of writing.
Q.1: How far do you agree that the current publishing trend is inclined towards commercially successful writing over good literature?
TS: I’m not too sure that this trend has ever been different. Publishers publish to make money. Always have, always will. And I’m unsure if there is no overlap between ‘good’ literature and commercially successful literature. The two are not on different poles, most definitely.
Q.2: Do you believe that having a cinematic quality in literary pieces has become the core focus of writing intent in the current scenario?
TS: No. I don’t see a decline in the ‘unfilmable’ novel. It is not an easy task, by the way, to maintain a certain cinematic quality in a novel. Imagine a novel of action. Imagine a fight scene in it. In cinema, the scene can play out in real time. In a book, the pace of reading is a delimiter. How do you bridge that gap? How do you still keep the cinematic aspect?
Q.3: How far does language play a role in the success of any literary work?
TS: Well, a big one. Irrespective of what is meant by ‘success’ here.
Q.4: In the era of ChatGPT, do you think AI has taken the literary world in a flutter?
TS: Low-grade genre fiction – the kind of fiction that already appeared to us to be industrially produced – will be in a full-blown automation-and-IP crisis soon. The high-brow people will say ‘Good riddance.’ But AI is different from robotic automation. It goes for white-collar and blue-collar alike. So, in literature, I imagine it is a matter of time before it comes to threaten – or at least seriously alters the underlying process of – complex fiction-making, the kind that wins non-genre prizes.
Q.5: A proud winner of the Sahitya Yuva Puraskar, and being longlisted in the prestigious Tata Literature Live and JCB Prize, how do you construct an authentic portrait of the world through your writing?
TS: I find authenticity a very heavy word. Authentic to what? The world? But the world is too big, even microcosms are too big. Definitely bigger than the story I want to tell. I focus instead on servicing believability – what will be good enough for the reader to believe and turn the page. I’m a fiction writer, my domain is subjective truths. At the most basic level, I produce what I produce through two risky actions (1) putting characters in a situation and (2) extrapolating their actions. Believability can break in either of the two. And so I craft the situation carefully, I choose the character carefully, and I extrapolate actions carefully. All this care is taken not in the name of anything as grand as authenticity, which is a limiting construct in that it repels a challenge, but for believability, which allows some play.
Q.6: With more assurance of support and success in traditional publishing, how has self-publishing impacted the literary world?
TS: I’m no publishing expert. I don’t think there is a big impact yet. I think self-publishing would be interesting for an author who’s also a bit of an entrepreneur. While the revenue story may look tempting, the costs can easily be ignored. Because of their scale, traditional publishers provide at a low cost many services in the making of a book from a manuscript. An author who self-publishes has to bear all this. And then they have to find ways of distribution. It isn’t easy, I believe, to make it work.
