Min Jin Lee spent roughly a decade on Pachinko. And she threw away a full draft somewhere in the middle of it. That detail tends to get a brief mention when people talk about her process, as if it's a footnote rather than the whole story. A discarded draft, in a project already stretching across years, means starting over, accepting that the version you've been building isn't the book that needs to exist, and then continuing anyway. The fact that she did that, and that the second version became one of the most celebrated novels of the twenty-first century, is about as clear a lesson in literary patience as you're likely to find.

Her route to that desk was itself a full detour. She graduated from Yale Law School, passed the bar, and was heading toward a legal career when a diagnosis of chronic hepatitis in 1989 redirected everything. The illness was serious enough to make her reconsider what she was doing with her time, and what she kept coming back to was writing. She had a choice that a lot of people make in theory but almost no one actually makes: she left a stable professional track to become a novelist. The books she eventually produced, Free Food for Millionaires in 2007 and Pachinko in 2017, are the kind of sweeping, multigenerational social-realist fiction that takes years to build. They were never going to come out of a life organized around billable hours.

Profile

The Routine at a Glance

Wake Time
Early mornings. Lee has described writing as a morning practice, though she has also written during her son's school hours, treating the day's quiet hours as the primary window.
Writing Location
Various locations over Pachinko's long development, including New York, Tokyo, and Washington D.C., where her husband was posted. She has said she can write anywhere she can sit with her notebooks.
Daily Output
She doesn't publicly track a word count. The emphasis in her interviews is on showing up to the material daily and following the research wherever it leads, rather than hitting a number.
Tools
Notebooks and longhand drafts, particularly in the early research and planning stages. She has described carrying notebooks and writing by hand before moving to typed drafts.
Famous Ritual
Deep, sustained research before and during drafting. For Pachinko, this included moving to Japan for several years, learning Japanese, interviewing Zainichi Korean community members, and visiting pachinko parlors.
Books Written This Way
Free Food for Millionaires (2007), Pachinko (2017).

Leaving Law for the Page

The illness changed the calculus. Lee had gone to Yale Law, was working at a law firm in New York in the late 1980s, and was in the middle of building the kind of professional life that looks settled from the outside. Then the hepatitis diagnosis arrived, and it was serious enough that she spent time in the hospital and had a real confrontation with what she actually wanted from her years. She has talked about this in interviews as a clarifying moment, not a romantic one. The question was simpler than that: time was probably shorter than she'd assumed, and she had to decide what to do with what remained.

She left the law, began writing seriously, and enrolled in the MFA program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. That transition, from law firm to fiction workshop, is one of those pivots that sounds clean in retrospect and was almost certainly chaotic in real time. She was in her late twenties, abandoning a credential that had taken years to earn, betting on a form she hadn't yet published in. What carried her through, by her own account, was a conviction that she had specific stories to tell about the Korean American experience that weren't being told anywhere else. The market wasn't asking for what she wanted to write. That was, in a certain way, the point.

For writers considering their own versions of that leap, Lee's trajectory is a useful counterpoint to the idea that writing talent alone gets you there. She was organized, disciplined, and research-obsessed. She treated fiction writing as a serious intellectual project, not an expressive release, and she built her practice accordingly. The day job was gone, but the rigor stayed.

The Pachinko Build and the Discarded Draft

The seed of Pachinko came from a story Lee heard in the late 1980s, before she left law: a Korean minister at a church in New York told her about the Zainichi Koreans, the ethnic Koreans who had lived in Japan for generations, often as second- and third-class residents despite having been born there. The discrimination they faced, the complexity of their legal status, the way their identity was caught between two countries that didn't fully claim them. That material lodged in her and didn't let go.

She spent years on a version of the novel that, by her account, wasn't working. She's described the early Pachinko manuscript as following a male protagonist, a minister, and centering on that character's moral dilemmas. After years of work on it, she felt the structure was wrong. The book needed to be about a family across generations, with a woman at its center, not a single man's story. She set aside what she had and started again. That kind of decision is harder than it sounds after you've already put in years. Most writers keep going with what they have because the sunk cost is too painful to abandon. Lee threw it out and went back to the beginning.

The revised version opened with the line "History has failed us, but no matter," which became one of the most discussed opening lines in contemporary literary fiction. It announced the book's scope immediately, four generations of a Korean family from 1910 to 1989, and set up a reading experience that would take most readers several days to complete. That opening sentence came out of the rebuilt draft, the one that started over. The discarded version presumably had a different first line. Whatever was lost in those early years, the book that survived them was better for the rebuild.

Research as Routine

Lee's working method is organized around research in a way that distinguishes her from most writers who work intuitively from their own experience. She doesn't just research before she drafts. She researches during drafting, between drafts, throughout revisions. For Pachinko, this meant years of reading Korean and Japanese history, but it also meant going to Japan in person, living there, and learning the community from the inside.

Her husband's work as a lawyer took the family to Tokyo for several years, and Lee used that time deliberately. She learned Japanese well enough to conduct interviews. She spent time in the Zainichi Korean community in Osaka. She visited pachinko parlors, which the novel takes its title from. She interviewed elderly Zainichi Koreans about their lives and the lives of their parents. The research was the foundation of the whole enterprise, and it shaped the texture of the prose in ways that are visible on every page. The novel feels inhabited from the inside because the writer was, in fact, inside it, physically present in the world she was describing.

This is a particular kind of writing routine that doesn't show up much in the genre-quiz productivity discussions about morning pages and daily word counts. It's the routine of someone who treats a novel as a long act of understanding, something that requires you to actually learn the world you're writing about before you can render it honestly. Lee has said in interviews that she is writing about people whose lives have been ignored or distorted, and that getting the details wrong would be a form of disrespect. That's not just a craft position. It's an ethical one, and it shapes every practical decision about how she works.

Persistence Through Early Rejection

Before Pachinko arrived, there was Free Food for Millionaires, and before that there were years of rejection. Lee's first novel took a long time to find a publisher, and when it did, the road to publication was a grind, not the triumphant arc that gets described after the fact. She was writing a 560-page novel about Korean American social life in New York at a moment when major publishers were not lining up for that kind of book. She kept working on it anyway.

Free Food for Millionaires came out in 2007 to strong critical reception and launched her career in the way a serious debut can. But the years between starting it and publishing it were years spent writing without a contract, without a clear market, without much reassurance that the project was going anywhere. She has talked in interviews about the importance of continuing to write even when the external signals are discouraging, and the lesson she draws is a plain one: the work has to justify itself to you, not to the market, or you won't be able to sustain it through the long stretches when the market is indifferent.

Her advice, distilled across many interviews, is that a writer has to love the work itself, not the idea of the work or its future reception, because the reception may not come for a very long time.

The decade she spent on Pachinko after publishing her first novel makes more sense when you understand that disposition. The Zainichi Korean story had demanded her attention for twenty years, and she felt an obligation to get it right. That sense of obligation to the material is what held the project together across two continents, a discarded draft, and a timeline that would have ended most writers' commitment to any single book.

The sweeping scale of her novels, the four-generation span of Pachinko, the social panorama of Free Food for Millionaires, comes directly from this kind of patience. You can't write a multigenerational epic on deadline anxiety. The books required a writer who had trained herself to think in decades, not quarters.

Sources

The primary sources for Min Jin Lee's writing habits and creative history are her many long-form interviews conducted around the publication of Pachinko in 2017, including her conversations with The Guardian in February 2017, where she discussed leaving law after her illness and the origin of the Pachinko project. Her appearances on NPR's Fresh Air and in The New York Times Book Review cover the discarded draft and the years of research in Japan. Her own author site at minjinlee.com collects talks and essays where she has described her working process in her own words, including her approach to research and her conviction that fiction about marginalized communities carries an ethical responsibility to accuracy.

What You Can Steal

Lee's practice is most useful for writers working on long, research-heavy projects with no clear external deadline. The specific transferable lessons: