A 'risk-averse' lawyer quit his job to write for TV. Now, he's adapted his own novel into a Hulu show.

• Charles Yu adapted his 2020 novel, "Interior Chinatown," into a Hulu series starring Jimmy O. Yang.
• Yu had a long career as a lawyer, during which he published several works of fiction.
• He pivoted to writing full time after getting staffed on the HBO series "Westworld."

Charles Yu's "first love" was literature, but before he became a novelist and showrunner, pragmatism led him down another path.

As an undergraduate, Yu pursued a pre-med track with a minor in creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley. After he failed to get into medical school, Yu flirted with a job in finance. Eventually, he settled on a career in law — practical, but something that played to his literary sensibilities.

The Columbia Law School grad worked as a lawyer for the next 13 years with stints at the top firm Sullivan & Cromwell LLP and the electronics company Belkin. All the while, he stayed creatively busy, publishing three books he'd written in his downtime.

"I didn't have to worry about where the mortgage payment was coming from, so I could just write when I got to write," Yu told Business Insider.

For more than a decade, Yu balanced his career and his passion. By 2014, he came to a crossroads when a major opportunity came his way: He was offered a staff writer position on the hit HBO sci-fi series "Westworld." He had to make a decision.

Yu's choice led him to where he is now, a decade later, as the showrunner of the Hulu series "Interior Chinatown" — based on the book of the same name that Yu, incidentally, also wrote. The high-concept comedy, which boasts Taika Waititi as an executive producer, follows Willis Wu (Jimmy O. Yang), a background character in a police procedural who desperately wants to become something more.

Yu spoke with BI about what convinced him to take that leap from law to TV and how he built up his writing career while maintaining a high-demand full-time job.

Before you got staffed on "Westworld," you had a pretty lengthy law career. How did you balance writing with working?

It changed every day.

My then fiancée, now wife, was very understanding and patient and knew that I had this passion. So before we had kids, especially, there was enough time to write. It got trickier after.

But it was a demanding job. The thing about it, though, especially with writing, is that I wasn't trying to be a film director. I wasn't a saxophonist. I could practice my thing in the car, in a café for 30 minutes, lunch even. Scribbling a few things down, it felt like a good refuge.

How did you conceptualize the two kinds of work? Was it like, "I have a vocation, and I have a career?"

Yeah, I liked the way you framed it. I mean, it was a vocation. I had a career, and that was my livelihood. I did not think of writing as a viable livelihood up until literally the moment it became my job through TV.

I think it's easy in hindsight to sort of make the path seem smoother or more deliberate than it was. Honestly, there were moments where I had doubts about both sides of it: "How can I get out of this law career, 'cause I'll never really know what I can do?" and the other side just like, "Am I wasting my time?"

I struggled with that a lot, because a lot of days, nothing productive came out. That feels terrible, you know?

When you got staffed on "Westworld," were you deliberately trying to move away from law and into TV at the time?

It came about over the course of a few years. I had a book agent already. He's not my current agent, but he hooked me up with a film and TV rights agent at United Talent Agency. They, at first, represented me for just rights to my fiction.

But I think, maybe partly because I live in LA and partly because I showed some interest, I got to meet executives and producers and see if there was anything in addition to my books and short stories that I might want to pitch to them — or just to develop a relationship.

Over the course of a couple of years, I got a little bit more comfortable with that, and I started to think about writing scripts. I actually wrote a terrible pilot based on one of my own ideas. I mean, it's truly terrible. My agents were probably really — I mean, I'm sure they'd seen it before, but they were like, "Yeah, we maybe don't send that out."

But they did send it out. They sent it to a couple of people, I think, that were very kind and patient. And I started to think about maybe doing that. I didn't think about staffing on someone else's show, which is ultimately how I got that call and got staffed on an HBO show.

I threw my hat in the ring, and over the course of two, three years, I somehow found my way onto a list and was able to get a job interview.

What made it feel like a viable career move at the time?

Two things. One, health insurance. That was very important to my wife, especially at the time. We still have two kids. We had just moved into a new house, and we'd moved a little bit out of LA to Orange County, but we had a mortgage, and we needed health insurance. So it was like, "Can you get that?" And I could, thanks to the Writers' Guild.

And two, it felt like the kind of thing you would take a leap for. It was a sold series, so I knew I would have at least six months of guaranteed employment at this show. I definitely didn't take for granted that I would get another job after that.

Quite honestly, I'm pretty risk-averse. But I think it was just the nature of this opportunity, a real decision point. I couldn't do both, obviously. I couldn't be in a writers' room and be practicing law. So that was when I finally took the leap.

I did keep my bar license active for a few years after.

How did your writing experience eventually inform "Interior Chinatown"?

I think I wanted to write something a bit more personal, not that I'd shied away from it before. It just felt like there was something in me that wanted to talk about this story, about this family, in a more direct way than I had.

Willis is not me, but I think there was an internal pressure to want to write about this family as a kind of fantasy or alternate-reality version of how my parents talked about their lives and people in their community.

Was it always a novel to you, or was there ever a point where you thought, "Maybe this is a television pilot?" When it started to become a television series, did you feel strongly about becoming its showrunner?

I didn't think of it as anything other than a novel. I actually thought it would be pretty hard to film, and it turned out it was!

So when they did approach me, I was amazed, but I sort of immediately had this feeling of like: "Oh, how am I going to do this? This is going to be tricky." And they knew, too; Hulu understood the challenge.

I think despite that on the surface-level it looks like a script, that it is a script, the trick would be figuring out how to translate it.

"Interior Chinatown" is now streaming on Hulu.