WEBVTT NOTE Episode 119: Thirty Years of Pachinko: Min Jin Lee on Failing Well 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.000 Pachinko took you nearly thirty years. What were those years actually spent on? 2 00:00:05.000 --> 00:00:29.000 Failing well, mostly. I wrote a whole version in the nineties from the point of view of a single Korean-Japanese man and it was flat, because I was writing an argument, not a family. Then my husband's job took us to Tokyo and I interviewed dozens of people — and I realised the story belonged to the women. I threw out the manuscript and started again in my forties. 3 00:00:29.000 --> 00:00:34.000 That's a brutal decision. How did you know it was right? 4 00:00:34.000 --> 00:00:48.000 Because the new pages were harder to write and easier to read. That's my only reliable test. When I'm defending a draft in my head, it's dead. When I'm nervous and curious, it's alive. 5 00:00:48.000 --> 00:00:52.000 You trained as a lawyer. Did that help or hurt? 6 00:00:52.000 --> 00:01:11.000 It taught me research and it taught me to sit down when I don't feel like it, which is ninety percent of this job. It also gave me a healthy fear of getting facts wrong about real people's suffering. I over-report. Then I let the reporting sink under the surface so the reader only feels the weight. 7 00:01:11.000 --> 00:01:14.000 Why write at all? 8 00:01:14.000 --> 00:01:37.000 Because ordinary people are historically invisible, and I find that unbearable. A woman selling kimchi in a market in Osaka is carrying an entire century. If I do my work properly, a reader in Ohio who has never thought about Korea for a minute of her life will grieve for her. That transaction is, to me, the point of the form. 9 00:01:37.000 --> 00:01:42.000 Advice for a writer holding a manuscript nobody wants yet? 10 00:01:42.000 --> 00:01:52.000 Keep it, keep going, and get older. Patience is an underrated craft skill — some books need the writer to become a different person first.