Engineer, pretentious movie reviewer, stand-up comedian, actor, and now in a new avatar as an author, Kanan Gill spoke to Anuradha Menon, aka Lolakutty, about his new book, stand-up, and more, at The Hindu Lit Fest 2024 session in Chennai, Acts of God..
Talking about how his tryst with writing a book began, Mr. Gill said, “I started writing when I was 15 years old, and anything of this scale quickly spirals out of control. I eventually got around to doing it now after having built the necessary skills. The book’s inception lies in a short story I wrote in 2016, which I discovered later. But, the final copy of the book has no resemblance with it.”
On how he began writing, Mr. Gill reveals how he used to blog in college, which was his first way of communicating with an audience he didn’t know. “But, every time I tried to write longer than 5,000 to 10,000 words, it seemed like an impossible task. So, I took to writing short stories up until I was confident enough to write a book.”
Also read: Read our live updates of The Hindu Lit Fest 2024, Day 2
The hardest part
Set in a post-nuclear world, the novel is a work of speculative fiction and brings together his passion for writing and love for science. Ask him what the most challenging part of the writing process was, and he glibly says, “Publishing. It is easily the hardest part. While I have been in the entertainment business for 11 years, this is my first novel, and it makes you examine what you want to gain from the book — if people were applauding me, it just meant I was a competent comedian. But I needed to investigate my goal of writing the book, which was the process of writing it. No part of writing it was tough and in fact, it was joyous experience. In a sense, I too was a reader of my book as I just went along with what came to me.”
Responding to Ms. Menon’s question on whether his characters were inspired by the people he met in life, Mr. Gill said, “I made no conscious method to mirror any character; it happened subconsciously. My characters are forced to process emotions I wouldn’t, as a person. While it was in no way a conscious process, in a real way, it has become a snapshot of what I was going through while writing this novel.”
Mr. Gill spoke about how writing was more freeing than stand-up. “When we do stand-up, we write a script, memorise and say it. You can always find out when someone is doing this because they will not be able to capture the audience’s interest. Speech has to be immediate; people should be able to understand it instantly. However, writing is liberating in a way that stand up is constraining for, in writing, one’s failures are private and low-risk. The flip-side, however, is that it takes three years to know where you stand,” he added.
