Trusting your story instincts

In addition to being an independent journalist, Hayasaki is an associate professor in the Literary Journalism Program at the University of California, Irvine, where she teaches longform feature writing. One of the biggest challenges is getting students to understand the elements of what she thinks of as “multidimensional narratives.” To help them find and focus this kind of story, she encourages them to define three key dimensions:

1. The character dimension: A person, place or thing moving through time
2. The social dimension: What does this story tell us about the world we live in, or the forces that shape it? (The nut graf of a story is usually embodied in dimension #2, as well as throughout the piece.)
3. The human condition dimension: The existential questions that haunt our reporting and research, becoming our themes.

These dimensions existed so clearly in Edralina’s story. Despite the rejections, Hayasaki kept pitching the story. “We’re often told ‘That’s sad, but it’s not really a story for us,’” Hayasaki says. “But you have to trust your instincts.”

The pitch finally landed in The New York Times. Reader letters confirmed her gut. One, from a person who serves as a full-time caregiver, wrote: “It makes me feel less alone. It’s a bulwark against despair. It makes me furious enough to work on strengthening my worn out compassion.”

The letter reminded Hayasaki why she felt so compelled to get on that plane to Maui.

“One of my mentors told me that what we do is part the curtain on humanity,” says Hayasaki, who adds that stories about disasters are ultimately stories about people. “Through them you can see something bigger.”

Annotation: Storyboard’s questions are in red; Hayasaki’s answers in blue. To read the story without annotations, click teh HIDE ANNOTATIONS button in the right hand menu on your monitor or at the top of your mobile screen.

She Survived the Maui Wildfires. She Couldn’t Survive the Year After.

Edralina Diezon was working as a janitor and sending money to her family in the Philippines when wildfires destroyed everything she had. The road to rebuilding her life proved to be perilous.

By Erika Hayasaki

August 21, 2024

The New York Times

Ms. Diezon, 69, wandered the charred streets for a few hours before encountering a police officer who took her to a hotel that had been turned into a shelter. Eventually, she would move into the beachfront Royal Lahaina Resort and Bungalows, along with more than 1,000 of Maui’s 8,000 displaced survivors.

One year ago, the deadliest wildfire in the United States in over a century turned Lahaina, on Maui, into a town of ash and ghosts. Buses still did not run in September. Streetlights did not shine. Stores left standing were shuttered. Employees and customers did not populate the Lahaina Gateway. Your most telling details here focus on what was missing. Had you seen Lahaina before the fires? Or did you have to imagine what it must have been like? Since I was there in the weeks after the fire, all of the burn zone was there before me. The lights were out, the employees gone. These were notes I had already from immersive reporting.

But Ms. Diezon still showed up to her janitorial job every day, unsure of where she would eventually live. Putting this sentence last in the paragraph increases its power. First you see the desolate, ruined landscape, and then you see a character moving through that landscape. Can you talk about how you decide to sequence facts and images in the beginning of a story? Readers often need to know a lot of things at once, but the order in which the details unfold often influences the effectiveness of a narrative. I had two brilliant narrative editors many years ago, when I was a staff reporter at the Los Angeles Times. One, Steve Padilla, always emphasizes the power of endings — not just the endings of stories, but of paragraphs and sentences. The last line or word can stay in a reader’s mind, echo, or leave them with a question, wanting to know more. My other narrative editor, Richard E. Meyer, wrote this Pulitzer Prize-finalist feature (interviewing a woman who could not speak, by using a letter board). He also emphasizes building stories through scenes and mini-cliffhangers. He calls this a “pile-driving” narrative. Propelling your story forward by planting questions in the reader’s mind: What will happen next? And what happened after that? So how you end a section, a paragraph, or even a sentence can do this narrative work for you. Lastly, in my classes at UC Irvine we often dissect story structure and think about how an anecdote is its own mini-story, with a beginning, middle and end. The director of our program, Barry Siegel, talks about how scenes are the structural building blocks of narratives. They also enliven the anecdotes that invigorate our nonfiction.

Each year, millions of people in the United States are displaced from their homes because of fires, hurricanes and other weather-related disasters — and then find themselves struggling to rebuild their lives, as Ms. Diezon did.

Nearly half of Maui’s wildfire survivors lost their jobs, according to the preliminary results from 679 people in a University of Hawaii study, which aims to track more than 1,000 people over the next decade. Thirteen percent of survivors in the study still do not have health insurance, and 40 percent of households are experiencing low food security. The previous two paragraphs are an effective nut graf (or nut section) that answers the “So what?” question and clarifies for readers how Ms. Diezon’s story fits into the bigger picture. How do you generally feel about nut grafs? Were these paragraphs part of your pitch? I have written longform stories that did not have nut grafs, like this one. I do remember having debates over whether narratives should have them or not. I think it depends. But I have also grown to appreciate nut grafs in magazine stories. They can help orient a reader by signaling why this story is important, but not giving away the ending. I will also say nut grafs are hard for me to write. I am much more comfortable in scenes. And yes, a version of this nut graf was in my pitch — and when it comes to pitching stories, I think they are essential.

For Ms. Diezon, managing her livelihood became an arduous daily undertaking that involved navigating a confusing and often uncoordinated network of organizations that provided aid, housing and other support. The Federal Emergency Management Agency and the United Way had begun to provide services, and celebrities pledged funds for fire victims. Locals also set up Venmo donation funds for families, but Ms. Diezon did not have an account.

She survived the fires that killed at least 102 others. But what does it mean to survive when society’s most vulnerable remain unprotected after a crisis? Great example of narration here to establish the driving question and theme. Do you include a sentence like this in most of your stories? This sentence was added after the editor pushed me for more here — a good call. I often think of stepping out of the scene and into narration, a statement or a reflection as “confident narrator’s voice.” You have to confidently know the story based on your reporting, and tell it, succinctly, to move it along and help establish themes. For Ms. Diezon, the road to rebuilding her life would turn perilous. This is a textbook lede that gets us very quickly into the narrative: In 382 words, you set the scene, introduced the main character and established her central conflict. It has an opening scene, nut graf(s), zoom-out moment to reveal and quantify the bigger picture, and a bit of narration that makes clear the central theme. Can you describe your approach to ledes? And how you teach your students what makes a great lede? I actually don’t teach traditional news lede writing in my classes very often, since I focus on feature writing. I do teach narrative and feature ledes, which to me can be more like anecdotal ledes, narrative scenes in medias res, or explanatory and declarative ledes. In my tip sheet for students, I tell them good narrative nonfiction or feature story openings achieve some, most, or all of these goals:

• Intrigue your reader with the first line or first few lines.
• Show action (in medias res).
• Establish or hint at a conflict. Introduce a crossroads or tension.
• Memorable detail/s that hold meaning.
• Emotion (which is conveyed by the details chosen).
• Establish or hint at a point of the piece.
• Use your confident narrator’s voice.
• Establish your main character, and point of view, perhaps from inside his or her mind.
• Establish questions for the readers, which we want answered by the end of the story.
• Establish the main subject as someone readers want to care about and get to know, someone we can relate to, even if their story is so completely different from ours.
• End on a cliffhanger. Withhold enough information to keep us wondering what will happen next.

A Longer, Darker Commute

Ms. Diezon’s husband, who had long been the family breadwinner, died of colon cancer in 2014. A year later, she received her green card and moved from Manila to Maui to join her brother, who drove a taxi and owned a now-destroyed seven-bedroom house where he rented rooms to tenants, including her.

Ms. Diezon was employed by a cleaning service and recycled aluminum cans on the side. She earned $15 an hour while juggling two or three jobs and saved enough to send $500 to $1,000 every two weeks to her four children and six grandchildren in the Philippines. When you met Ms. Diezon, how and when did you know what her central conflict would be? And how did you broach the topic of money, which can be awkward to talk about? This didn’t take much extra effort. It was all unfolding in front of me as I followed her around, and she wasn’t guarded about it. Edralina was pretty clear with me that this was all part of her daily struggle, and thousands of others right there alongside her.

Ms. Diezon’s paychecks helped pay for upgrades to her family home in the Philippines and her grandchildren’s schooling. She also collected goods, sending a care package every three months filled with clothes, cologne, handbags and food.

Before the wildfires, Ms. Diezon walked less than a mile to get home from work, an easy distance to her neighborhood of multigenerational houses behind the Lahaina Gateway. After the fires, one of Ms. Diezon’s daily dilemmas involved figuring out how she would commute. The Royal Lahaina hotel was four miles north of the shopping center, along the fast-moving and dangerous Honoapiilani Highway.

One dark evening in September, Portia Marcelo, 43, encountered Ms. Diezon waiting alone at an unlit gas station adjacent to the Lahaina Gateway. (Disclosure: Ms. Marcelo, a photographer, is a friend of this reporter.) Why was it important to disclose that relationship? Was this your or the editor’s instinct to add the disclosure? Initially, I wrote this part and some other sections in first person, because I knew Portia was going to be a part of it, and I didn’t want that revealed in a clunky way. I think because I am used to magazine writing these days, you can get away with slipping into first-person. But the editor let me know The New York Times would not use first person for this story. So the first round of edits actually cut out any parts mentioning that I knew Portia. I raised that issue with the editor, and explained I thought it would be unethical to not reveal Portia is a friend. He agreed and we added the clunky phrase. When in doubt, it’s always better to be ethical, even if the prose is not as pretty. Ms. Diezon was trying to go back to the Royal Lahaina and had resorted to hitchhiking. She climbed into the back seat and Ms. Marcelo, who is also Filipina, asked Ms. Diezon if she was OK.

“I’m sad,” Ms. Diezon replied. She explained how difficult it had been to get rides back from work.

“Auntie, I know in our culture it is hard to ask for help,” Ms. Marcelo said to her. “But always ask for help.”

A Maze of Services

Courtney Lazo, 34, who is Filipina and Native Hawaiian, said non-English-speaking communities often slipped through the cracks. Filipinos make up 40 percent of Lahaina residents, and Ms. Lazo, a fire survivor, had seen frustrated Filipino families walk away from Red Cross sites without aid because they could not navigate services. So, on Labor Day, she helped coordinate a Filipino outreach event at the Royal Lahaina.

The event had translators who spoke Tagalog and Ilocano. When volunteers arrived in red-and-yellow “Lahaina Strong” T-shirts, Ms. Diezon dashed to the front of the “needs assessment” line.

“We’re getting everybody’s name, what you’re needing,” a volunteer said. That information would be submitted to the larger community organizations, which were coordinating relief efforts, funds and support. Ms. Diezon sat at a table opposite a volunteer.

“Do you need insurance claims?”

“I don’t have insurance,” Ms. Diezon replied.

“Employment?”

“I have work for now.”

“OK, transportation?”

“I need, yeah, I need.”

The volunteer asked more questions about rebuilding, housing and her mental health, then told her to move to the next station. “That’s where they’re doing the Oprah,” she said. “They’re going to help you sign up for that one, OK?”

Oprah Winfrey and the actor Dwayne Johnson originally committed $10 million to the People’s Fund of Maui to provide direct monthly cash payments to families whose homes had been destroyed. They teamed up with the Entertainment Industry Foundation and ultimately raised nearly $60 million. For recipients, it worked out to temporary payments of around $1,200 a month. How did you report and fact-check these figures? These came through previous reporting in The New York Times. Also, I was able to confirm some of these numbers on the ground when following Edralina as she applied for aid. Ms. Diezon took a photo and handed over her ID and bank routing number.

Next, Ms. Diezon went to another hotel to inquire about disaster relief funding from Maui United Way, which was distributing direct cash payments of $1,000 to nearly 8,000 individuals affected by the fires. But when she arrived, she was directed to another location that she couldn’t go to because she had to leave for work.

Ms. Diezon’s journey is emblematic of the toll taken on many survivors trying to navigate services after a climate disaster. Government organizations like FEMA and the Small Business Administration can provide financial assistance, but some survivors discover that they aren’t always eligible because of various bureaucratic reasons and instead have to rely on nonprofits like church organizations and friends or families for aid.

A Final Shift and a Return Home

In the days and weeks that followed, Ms. Diezon, heeding Ms. Marcelo’s advice, asked for help. Deft transition. What’s your advice on writing good transitions? I often follow the “Law and Order Rule,” which I did not come up with. This is another craft technique term coined by Steve Padilla. It is about cutting to the scene, to the middle of it. Cutting out the “throat clearing,” details where someone is walking, turning a knob, opening a door, etc. Just cut to action. This goes for the first scene in a story. But also the subsequent ones and mini chapters within our stories. I think of stories as having mini chapters, even ones at this length 2,000 or so words. This story section is less scene-based, more confident narrator’s voice, but it is the same idea of cutting to the key action of the section: Edralina asking for help. At first, she asked Ms. Marcelo, who spent a few days shuttling her to appointments to have her glasses replaced, to the motor vehicle division to get an official state identification card and to a supermarket to wire money to her family. She complained that her foot hurt and another survivor, Myla Lazarte, 42, told her she should try to get new shoes.

By winter, most of the Gateway’s shops had reopened and buses had started running again. Ms. Diezon’s shift usually ended around 8 p.m. — the same time the last bus back toward her hotel stopped running. Missing it meant that Ms. Diezon would be scrambling, yet again, to find a ride in the dark.

By spring, Ms. Diezon began to appear despondent. Seems like a deliberate choice of words to avoid saying she felt despondent. Can you talk about that word choice? At this point, this particular detail had come from Edralina’s coworkers, after her death, when I went back to Lahaina to interview them and piece together the details of how she died. Since Edralina was no longer alive to tell me how she felt, I chose to write this through the eyes of her coworkers, who described her as appearing despondent. It also felt more accurate.

She had told her daughter Eden Diezon Balobo that she lived “like a princess” at the Royal Lahaina, with her own room, bed and balcony view. But most fire evacuees had been notified that they would be moved out of the hotels by the summer, and waves of survivors had been told to check out. Lahaina had a severe housing shortage, and some survivors relocated to far-off neighborhoods.

For Ms. Diezon, moving away from Lahaina would have most likely meant finding a new job after she had spent the last seven months doing everything to keep the one she had.

On April 1, Ms. Balobo, who lives in Manila, received a $300 wire transfer from her mother.

Two days later, Charlie Solis, 65, Ms. Diezon’s longtime co-worker who considered her an “older sister,” called her before she finished her shift.

“Don’t forget to clean the manager’s office,” he said. Ms. Diezon assured him that she would make it tidy.

It was dark when Ms. Diezon left work. She was not wearing the white flower-printed Hawaiian shirt uniform that the other cleaners wore. On this evening, Ms. Diezon wore black. How did you report this telling detail, and why did you use it? It establishes that she was less visible in the dark. But it also feels like a hint of metaphor or foreshadowing. This was a detail in the police reports. But I confirmed it with coworkers, who showed me the uniform she was supposed to wear and also explained to me that she disliked wearing it and would prefer to wear her own attire. They also fretted over how they wished she wore the uniform because it was brighter and perhaps that could have prevented her from being hit.

To catch the bus, she had to cross the Honoapiilani Highway and cut across the parking lot of the Lahaina Cannery Mall, where the driver picked up passengers. There was a crosswalk at Keawe Street, but that meant overshooting the bus stop. Ms. Diezon might have spotted the bus coming down the highway. Maybe she tried to move fast. Maybe she moved too slow. The “maybe” acknowledges the uncertainty of factors that we may never be able to know for sure. Can you talk about when and how to use this in a narrative? I am such a narrative nerd, I actually have entire lessons on using “speculation” in nonfiction writing, the language of “perhaps,” “what if,” “imagine,” “maybe,” “could have,” etc. Speculation can add richness to lost moments in history, and to the lives of people who cannot be quoted today, or whose stories were not preserved in full color — sometimes because the systems did not keep meaningful documents on them, or did not consider them to be multidimensional humans in the first place. So I draw from writers like “Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments,” by Saidiya Hartman, who uses speculative interjections to imagine how her historical subjects may have reacted, spoke or experienced life in a particular moment. Or Johanna Adorjan’s “An Exclusive Love,” in which she reconstructs her grandparents’ suicides in vivid scenes by stepping out of reported “facts” and using “I imagine.” Or Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild,” when he goes on his own journey into the woods to consider how his dead subject, Chris McCandless, felt. Or Sebastian Junger’s “The Perfect Storm,” when he reconstructs what it would be like to drown, even though he could not ask the victims themselves. Also Maxine Hong Kingston’s essay, “No Name Woman,” in which she imagines how her aunt became pregnant, and this gives her aunt a voice.

A 2017 Nissan Rogue driven south on the highway by a 17-year-old girl struck Ms. Diezon around 8:15 p.m., about 400 feet north of Keawe Street. The Maui Police Department said it did not appear that Ms. Diezon had used the crosswalk. This moment, when the main character dies unexpectedly in a dramatic and tragic way, might have invited some writers to use more words or purple writing to accentuate the drama. You chose a succinct approach with unadorned prose. Why? I just think being spare, especially with something so tragic, is the way to go. It doesn’t need anything more. The incident itself is enough, and it is shocking.

Ms. Balobo received a video call from Ms. Diezon’s brother. He was in a hospital room, next to his sister. Ms. Diezon had died, three days before her 70th birthday. How and when did you find out that Ms. Diezon had died? How did you feel and react? How did it change the story? How do you continue working on a story with sources who’ve just suffered a tragic loss? I found out from another woman who knew Edralina on Maui and whose family had been living in the same hotel. She sent me a Facebook post via text about the accident, because she knew I had spent time with Edralina on Maui. I actually did not believe it at first. I went down a rabbit hole trying to find out if it was true. It was heartbreaking. I had been trying to pitch and write Edralina’s story, and many other survivors’ stories, for a while. But I had received many rejections. Her death propelled me to keep trying. I wanted people to know her story. To feel something for her, as I did. I wrote this graf into the first draft of the story, but when they cut the first-person, it got cut too:

After she died, I reread text messages that I had received from Ms. Diezon, not long after I met her in the wake of the wildfires. She wrote to me about her grandkids in college, high school and elementary school, how she supported them financially. “I don’t know what’s happening next to my work,” she wrote. “It’s very hard for now ma’am.”

Ms. Diezon’s friends and loved ones could not fathom how she had survived the devastating wildfires, working to reconstruct her livelihood, only to die senselessly.

Ms. Diezon’s brother started a crowdfunding campaign to raise money to send her body back to the Philippines to hold a proper funeral. Her children did not want her returned to them in ashes.

The family set a fund-raising goal of $30,000 to pay for the transportation of Ms. Diezon’s body, along with funeral expenses. It raised only $475. The family did not know how it would ever afford to bring her home and considered burying her on Maui.

In May, Ms. Diezon’s brother called Ms. Balobo. He had learned about his sister’s savings account. It contained all the money she had saved over her lifetime: $19,000. It was enough to ship her to Manila and pay for her funeral.

On June 11, Ms. Diezon’s body arrived in a coffin wrapped in brown paper. Six men carried her remains into a truck. For Ms. Diezon’s funeral on June 17, her open coffin was shrouded in white daisies. A framed photo of Ms. Diezon sat alongside her body and a statue of Jesus. This makes me think of Hemingway’s advice for writing emotionally stirring scenes: Don’t describe the emotion. Describe “the sequence of fact and motion which made the emotion.” How would you describe your approach? Yes, I always would prefer to have details in my reporting that show the emotion. I try to cut the adjectives and adverbs when I can, stick to reported details that convey something deeper and evoke a feeling, rather than trying to describe one.

Upon learning of her death, Ms. Marcelo wondered if she could have done more to help Ms. Diezon. “She is a victim of that fire,” she said.

* * *

Kim Cross is the author of three nonfiction books, including “In Light of All Darkness.” She teaches feature writing for Harvard Extension School’s master’s degree program in journalism and is a founding instructor of the Hemingway Center’s Sawtooth Writing Retreat.