{"id":11469,"date":"2024-09-19T12:00:18","date_gmt":"2024-09-19T12:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2024\/09\/19\/maui-wildfires-freelance-journalism-pitching-narrative-structure\/"},"modified":"2024-10-22T19:03:29","modified_gmt":"2024-10-22T19:03:29","slug":"maui-wildfires-freelance-journalism-pitching-narrative-structure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2024\/09\/19\/maui-wildfires-freelance-journalism-pitching-narrative-structure\/","title":{"rendered":"How a freelancer’s story instincts landed a piece in The New York Times"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
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Three weeks after the nation\u2019s deadliest wildfire in a century blackened a huge swath in Maui, freelance journalist Erika Hayasaki<\/a> felt called to go there and tell the story. At home in Southern California, she saw dramatic TV coverage and news stories about escapes, but noticed that \u201cinformation felt very muddled.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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\u201cI thought: There is a need for narratives there<\/em>,\u201d she recalls. After reaching out to a few editors, some of whom were on vacation, she wasn\u2019t able to secure a story assignment. She\u2019d have to travel on her own dime and report on her own time. But she had a friend on the island and enough airline miles for a round-trip ticket. \u201cSo I just went.\u201d On her way to Maui, she did receive one assignment from an editor at New York Magazine, which ultimately covered her travel expenses and led to her first published piece out of Lahaina, \u201cMaui on Fire<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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During her 10 days of reporting on the ground, she found other compelling stories that spoke to many themes: colonialism, the environment, the history of Hawaii, climate change, the economics of natural disaster relief. When she returned, she sent out 23 pitches and two grant applications to do more in-depth reporting on Maui. \u201cI got 16 rejections (including the grants),\u201d she says. \u201cI had all these people I wanted to write about. A lot of editors thought, \u2018The story is over.\u2019 When people move on, that\u2019s when it gets hard.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Out of the 23 pitches, she eventually landed seven features<\/a>. The last one, annotated below, was \u201cShe Survived the Maui Wildfire. She couldn\u2019t Survive the Year After.\u201d<\/a><\/strong> It was repeatedly rejected by various publications. But Hayasaki couldn\u2019t give up on it.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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A high-stakes story with a clear theme<\/h2>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n
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Hayasaki met the main subject, a Flilipina janitor named Edralina Diezon, at a resort hotel where Edralina was sheltering with 1,000 other survivors. \u201cWhat struck me about her story is that she was still going to work every day in a mall that was completely closed down,\u201d Hayasaki says. \u201cThe stakes were clear: What is she going to do on a day-to-day basis? How is she going to survive the next year?\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Shadowing Edralina as she applied for post-fire disaster relief, Hayasaki witnessed her central conflict: \u201cManaging 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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\"Freelance
Erika Hayasaki<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/div> \n
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The elements of a compelling narrative were there: An empathetic main character; a central conflict that provides tension and manifests in a clear struggle; a distinct point of view that distills and focuses a specific element of the bigger disaster; a driving question that speaks to a bigger theme: What does it mean to survive when society\u2019s most vulnerable remain unprotected after a crisis?<\/em><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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The resulting 2,000-word feature felt like a \u201cmicro-narrative\u201d for a writer whose sweet spot is in 5,000- to 7,000-word stories. The story echoes the elements and themes of a book that shaped Hayasaki\u2019s approach to narrative nonfiction: \u201cHiroshima,\u201d<\/a> by John Hersey, which tells the story of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima through six Japanese survivors. She read the book when she was 13 years old, after her Japanese father encouraged her to learn about this history. \u201cThe book always stuck with me,\u201d she said in the audio reporter commentary embedded at the top of the story<\/a>. \u201cBecause of the power of the writing and the narrative. It became a sort of guiding light in my own career years later.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Trusting your story instincts<\/h2>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n
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In addition to being an independent journalist, Hayasaki is an associate professor in the Literary Journalism Program at the University of California, Irvine<\/a>, where she teaches longform feature writing. One of the biggest challenges is getting students to understand the elements of what she thinks of as \u201cmultidimensional narratives.\u201d To help them find and focus this kind of story, she encourages them to define three key dimensions:<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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  1. The character dimension: A person, place or thing moving through time<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  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.)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3. The human condition dimension: The existential questions that haunt our reporting and research, becoming our themes.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n
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    These dimensions existed so clearly in Edralina\u2019s story. Despite the rejections, Hayasaki kept pitching the story. \u201cWe\u2019re often told \u2018That\u2019s sad, but it\u2019s not really a story for us,\u2019\u201d Hayasaki says. \u201cBut you have to trust your instincts.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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    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: \u201cIt makes me feel less alone. It\u2019s a bulwark against despair. It makes me furious enough to work on strengthening my worn out compassion.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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    The letter reminded Hayasaki why she felt so compelled to get on that plane to Maui.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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    \u201cOne of my mentors told me that what we do is part the curtain on humanity,\u201d says Hayasaki, who adds that stories about disasters are ultimately stories about people. \u201cThrough them you can see something bigger.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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    Annotation:<\/strong> Storyboard\u2019s questions are in red; Hayasaki\u2019s 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.<\/em><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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    \"Freelance
    Edralina Diezon, seated in center, joins dozens of other Maui residence seeking assistance after being displaced by the August 2023 wildfires on Maui. Freelance reporter Erika Hayasaki, foreground in red, filed several stories in the wake of the fire.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/div> \n
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    She Survived the Maui Wildfires. She Couldn\u2019t Survive the Year After.<\/h2>\n

    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.<\/em><\/h3>\n\n <\/a>How did you feel about this headline? Did you feel like it generated tension through foreshadowing or worry it was giving away the ending of the story?<\/span>I did worry that the headline gave away the ending. But after hearing from readers, I realized that many didn\u2019t not know \u201csurvive\u201d would be in a literal sense and in the end I thought the headline could foreshadow something, but leave readers wanting to know what happened to Edralina. In my audio interview about reporting the piece, the producers for Reporter Reads were also intentional to not reveal anything about the ending.<\/span><\/span>

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    \n By Erika Hayasaki<\/strong>
    \n\n August 21, 2024
    \n\n The New York Times
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    \n A<\/span>s a whirlwind of flames nearly encircled the Lahaina Gateway shopping center on Aug. 8, 2023, Edralina Diezon hid in a storage room, surrounded by mops, buckets and brooms. Terrified, Ms. Diezon, who worked 80 hours a week as a janitor, did not leave for two days and two nights. When she finally emerged, starving and disoriented, the neighborhood where she lived was gone.     <\/a>How did you report this reconstructed scene? How do you go about choosing an opening scene?<\/span>For this scene, when I first met Edralina, she described hiding and being encircled by flames, wandering out starving. I did visit her at the mall where she worked. But it was not until after she passed away that I went inside the janitorial room. I had returned to Maui, and I found her coworkers, who took me into the room where she hid. I captured the details of the mops, brooms (and much more, which did not make it into the story) on my phone videos and photos. I always knew this would be a potential entry point into the story, because the idea of hiding for so long and coming out into a destroyed landscape felt like a pivotal moment, and an inciting incident for what would come next.<\/span><\/span>

    \n 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\u2019s 8,000 displaced survivors.
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    \n 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.    <\/a>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?<\/span>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.<\/span><\/span>
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    \n But Ms. Diezon still showed up to her janitorial job every day, unsure of where she would eventually live.    <\/a>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?<\/span>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<\/a>, always emphasizes the power of endings \u2014 not just the endings of stories, but of paragraphs and sentences. The last line or word can stay in a reader\u2019s mind, echo, or leave them with a question, wanting to know more.<\/span><\/span><\/a>My other narrative editor, Richard E. Meyer, wrote this Pulitzer Prize-finalist feature<\/a> (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 \u201cpile-driving\u201d narrative. Propelling your story forward by planting questions in the reader\u2019s mind: What will happen next? And what happened after that?<\/em> So how you end a section, a paragraph, or even a sentence can do this narrative work for you.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/a>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<\/a>, talks about how scenes are the structural building blocks of narratives. They also enliven the anecdotes that invigorate our nonfiction.<\/span><\/span><\/span>
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    \n Each year, millions of people in the United States are displaced from their homes because of fires, hurricanes and other weather-related disasters \u2014 and then find themselves struggling to rebuild their lives, as Ms. Diezon did.
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    \n Nearly half of Maui\u2019s 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.    <\/a>The previous two paragraphs are an effective nut graf (or nut section) that answers the \u201cSo what?\u201d question and clarifies for readers how Ms. Diezon\u2019s story fits into the bigger picture. How do you generally feel about nut grafs? Were these paragraphs part of your pitch?<\/span>I have written longform stories that did not have nut grafs, like this one<\/a>. 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 \u2014 and when it comes to pitching stories, I think they are essential. <\/span><\/span>
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    \n 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.
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    \n She survived the fires that killed at least 102 others. But what does it mean to survive when society\u2019s most vulnerable remain unprotected after a crisis?    <\/a>Great example of narration here to establish the driving question and theme. Do you include a sentence like this in most of your stories?<\/span>This sentence was added after the editor pushed me for more here \u2014 a good call. I often think of stepping out of the scene and into narration, a statement or a reflection as \u201cconfident narrator\u2019s voice.\u201d You have to confidently know the story based on your reporting, and tell it, succinctly, to move it along and help establish themes. <\/span><\/span>For Ms. Diezon, the road to rebuilding her life would turn perilous.<\/a>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?<\/span>I actually don\u2019t 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:<\/span><\/span>
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