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"The panoramic view from the pro shop window was dazzling. The grounds below were carpeted with kelly green grass, and the sky above the horizon was half silver and lavender. From where she stood, she could see a couple foursomes playing--spotless white carts lolling there waiting to ferry them to their next hole. Acres upon acres of manicured and coiffed like a rich second wife for the enjoyment of a few entitled individuals."

You can't write glittering descriptions like that without tons of research. That's an exclusive golf club in the book Free Food for Millionaires, an epic novel about one girl's tumultuous life in New York City.

It's written by first-time novelist, Min Jin Lee, our special guest this week. Today she explains how she managed the research for her sprawling novel.

Welcome to my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson's mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web writing. 

Jason Boog:
You just moved to Tokyo (I think!) to research your new novel. How do you conduct research for your books? What did you learn while researching Free Food for Millionaires?

Min Jin Lee:
I am moving to Tokyo in the middle of August, and I will be working on my second novel there. I was a history major in college, and I am a serious believer in research. Continue reading...

I interviewed about fifty people for FFFM (some of these interviews were several hours long); I pretended to apply to Harvard Business School for a day; I took a semester of millinery at the Fashion Institute of Technology; I attended P-rade at Princeton University and visited Princeton when it was in session; I visited sites in Elmhurst and Forest Hills and went to New Haven, Connecticut, Cambridge, Massachusetts and visited a famous milliner in London.

I learned that for me, researching for fiction is a continuous process. I didn’t research and then write. I wrote, researched, rewrote, and researched up till the very end.

Surprising lesson: Geographic research taught me that in terms of physical description, what I imagined was never that far off from what was actually true.

What I thought F.I.T. would look like was really not much different from what I visited—except the escalators. I didn’t expect escalators at a school. But experience research taught me that there really is a difference between doing something versus imagining something, e.g. millinery.

I was a terrible hat-maker, though in my mind, I’d rather imagined that I would not be so clumsy. As for talk research (meeting people, formal interviews), I found that mannerisms were far more telling than speech. Often, interviews changed the plot, because I learned new things.

The best advice I ever got was to research after writing the first draft so that you won’t research Everything or get lost at sea. I followed this advice somewhat, and it was very helpful.