Tan Twan Eng interview

How have you lived with the terror of your homeland's history -- World War II through the "Emergency" that finally ended in 1960 -- that you recreated in your books? Both books must have taken years to write, which means you must have had to endure long years of inhabiting the historically accurate world you had to conjure forth on the page?

I've always been interested in that period of our past, so I had been reading up and collecting materials on it for years. When I wrote The Gift of Rain, I had all the details I needed in my head and it was a just matter of crafting the story. There comes a point when the writer has to forget his research and just, simply, tell the tale.
   Writing The Garden of Evening Mists, on the other hand, required more extensive research. The settings and the time period were different from Gift's, and I was never much of a gardening man, so it took a lot of work to learn how to create a Japanese garden. But the more research I did, the more fascinated I became with it and the more I appreciated it; I realized that the principles of gardening could be applied to life, too.

   Dealing with the horrors of the Japanese Occupation and the violence of the Malayan Emergency was at times emotionally draining, but it's the writer's responsibility to feel, and then to convey those emotions to the readers, otherwise the writing will come across as lifeless.

Via  Bookslut