Lee treats writing like a job with fixed hours and a stubborn morning ritual. She works six days a week and opens every session the same way, whether the words come easily or not.

The Direct Answer
Six days a week, mornings, after coffee and a chapter of the Bible.
She reads a chapter of the Bible before she writes or revises, a habit she borrowed from Willa Cather, per PBS NewsHour.

A Ritual Before the Writing

Lee opens her workday by reading a chapter of the Bible, a pre-work habit she's said she took from Willa Cather's process. She works six days a week and writes whenever she can find the room for it. The routine goes back to the mid-1990s, when she left her law job and had to build a writing life from scratch. In those early years the morning ran on a tighter script.

Each morning, I'd get up early to pack my husband's lunch, and after he'd left for work, I'd drink coffee and read the newspapers, then try to write fiction.

Min Jin Lee, PBS NewsHour

The order mattered. Coffee and the newspapers gave her a running start and kept the fiction tethered to the real world she'd spend years reporting on. She frames it as trying to write, which is an honest way to describe how hard the sitting-down part can be, even after two acclaimed novels.

Research Like a Reporter

Lee doesn't just sit and imagine her way into a novel. She reads the important academic research on a subject first, then the mainstream news coverage, and around the same time she interviews people and does fieldwork. She's described herself as a journalist and social-scientist wanna-be who admires how reporters and academics build new knowledge. The interviews aren't a garnish on the finished book. She's said they force her to revise entire books, because actual people keep contradicting the neat conclusions historians and sociologists reach on paper. That reporting instinct is a big reason Pachinko got scrapped and rewritten. For the wider view, here's the full Min Jin Lee writing routine.

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