Nora Ellis: Pachinko took you nearly thirty years. What were those years actually spent on?
Min Jin Lee: 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.
Nora Ellis: That's a brutal decision. How did you know it was right?
Min Jin Lee: 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.
Nora Ellis: You trained as a lawyer. Did that help or hurt?
Min Jin Lee: 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.
Nora Ellis: Why write at all?
Min Jin Lee: 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.
Nora Ellis: Advice for a writer holding a manuscript nobody wants yet?
Min Jin Lee: Keep it, keep going, and get older. Patience is an underrated craft skill — some books need the writer to become a different person first.