Waking from Innocent Dreams

About the Book

In 2016, I started writing what I thought would be a series of blog posts exploring my reunion with my birth family. Ten years later, I'm finishing a literary fiction novel that combines memoir, magical realism, and historical fiction. It's a coming-of-age story about a teen adoptee who finally gets the reunion he's always longed for. Haunted by a ghostly boy and caught between two families, he must wake from his childhood dreams and forge his own path in the beautifully flawed reality he discovers.

Waking From Innocent Dreams asks the question: Can a family reunited in the aftermath of war ever truly heal their broken bonds? But for me, the real project has been teaching myself fiction craft through deliberate practice. I've had to learn everything from what a scene is to how cinematic structure translates to prose, from character development to building dramatic tension.

I approached writing fiction the same way I approached teaching myself software development: as a learnable system with principles, structures, and techniques to study and practice. Over the past decade, I've completed a full draft of a manuscript, received feedback from agents and early readers, and am now finishing a major rewrite that deepens the magical realism framework and historical fiction elements. The book isn't published yet, but the decade spent learning the craft has taught me that complex creative skills can be mastered through systematic study and persistent practice, lessons that apply far beyond writing.

The Challenge

When I started writing in 2016, I had never written fiction before. I didn't know what a scene was or how to construct one. I'd learned narrative theory through working on my documentary film, but theory and practice are different things.

The specific problems I faced were:

How do you teach yourself fiction craft from scratch? I couldn't go back to school for an MFA. I had to teach myself through books, courses, podcasts, and workshops, figuring out which principles were universal and which needed adaptation for my specific story about trauma, memory, and identity.

How do you structure a complex story spanning decades, countries, and languages? My story involved forced disappearances during El Salvador's civil war, international adoption, a reunion 16 years later, and navigating two very different families. How do you give that narrative shape while balancing memoir truth with the needs of the fictional narrative?

How do you apply cinematic narrative structure to prose? I had been studying Save the Cat and the Hero's Journey for my documentary, but those frameworks were developed for screenplays. What changes when adapting them to a novel?

The fundamental challenge was treating fiction writing as a craft that could be learned systematically, not a mystical talent you either have or don't. I believed that if I could learn Ruby on Rails and full-stack web development through deliberate practice, I could learn to write fiction the same way.

My Approach

Starting With Practice

In January 2016, I started writing blog posts to practice applying story structure principles to creative writing. At the time, I wasn’t thinking of writing a book; I was trying to see if I could make the framework work with my own story.

I realized that my "ordinary world" as an American high school student had been completely upended at age 16 by discovering my birth family in El Salvador. The classic hero's journey structure fit perfectly: the call to adventure, crossing the threshold, trials and challenges, return transformed. But could I actually execute it in prose?

Three months later, I had 19 posts and over 20,000 words. I realized I had much more to say than a few blog posts could contain, and that's when I got serious about writing a book.

Learning the Fundamentals

My first major breakthrough came from working through a Story Grid exercise. I thought I'd been writing "scenes," but I discovered they were actually high-level summaries of events, not dramatized moments. A scene, I learned, takes place in one location and represents a single change in the character's situation or understanding.

This revelation changed everything. It meant I needed to slow down, dramatize specific moments, and show change in action rather than just report that it happened. That single insight transformed scattered blog posts into the foundation for a novel.

I began systematically learning craft through multiple sources:

• Books on story structure, character development, and prose technique
• Online courses about dramatic tension and scene construction
• Podcasts analyzing how published novels achieve their effects
• Writing workshops where I could get feedback on actual pages

I approached each element of craft—dialogue, description, pacing, point of view—as a learnable skill that could be practiced and refined.

Applying Save the Cat to Literary Fiction

Some of my favorite books on story structure are in the Save the Cat series, which focuses on commercial fiction and screenwriting. Applying it to literary fiction required adaptation, since literary fiction prioritizes interiority, ambiguity, and language over plot momentum. I learned to track my protagonist's emotional arc using Save the Cat beats while maintaining the contemplative, character-focused style literary fiction requires.

The Rewrite Process

After completing a draft and querying agents, I received valuable feedback: the bones of the story worked, but it needed to go deeper into the character's internal journey and include more about the Salvadoran civil war. I also realized readers were interpreting the book as a straight memoir rather than the fictionalized narrative I intended.

That's when I started incorporating magical realism and strengthening the historical fiction elements. I believe it's in these rewrites and the constant process of asking, "What does this story need?" that the real craft learning happens.

Story Construction as System Design

Throughout this process, I've noticed fascinating parallels between story construction and software design. Both require thinking at multiple levels simultaneously: In software, you consider business goals, system architecture, database design, API structure, and individual lines of code—all at once. In novel writing, you consider the global story arc, act structure, scene sequences, individual scene construction, paragraph rhythm, and line-by-line prose—all at once. Each level impacts the others.

Recognizing this parallel helped me approach fiction craft more confidently. I already knew how to think in systems; I just needed to learn how to apply that thinking to narratives.

Where It Stands Now

It's taken me ten years to get Waking From Innocent Dreams to where it is today, not because I've been stuck, but because I'm committed to getting it right. I've completed one full manuscript draft, queried agents, received detailed feedback, and I'm now finishing a substantial rewrite that incorporates that feedback and deepens the book's literary elements.

Once this rewrite is complete, I'll be seeking literary representation again. The book isn't published yet, but completion is imminent, and I'm determined to see this project through.

What I've Learned

Complex creative skills can be mastered through deliberate practice. Fiction writing is a craft that can be learned the same way I learned Ruby on Rails or documentary filmmaking. You study the principles, practice the techniques, get feedback, and iterate.

Theory and practice enable each other. Learning narrative theory gave me frameworks, but I didn't truly understand them until I applied them to my own manuscript. Structure doesn't constrain creativity: it provides principles for informed creative choices.

Rewriting is where craft matters most. Anyone can generate a first draft with enough determination. Taking that draft and making it actually work requires a deep understanding of the craft to diagnose problems and implement solutions.

Cross-disciplinary thinking enhances both disciplines. Seeing the parallels between software architecture and story structure made me better at both. Systems thinking applies whether you're building applications or building narratives.

Fiction writing has been one of the most challenging learning curves I've undertaken. But approaching it systematically, treating craft as learnable rather than mystical, and putting in years of deliberate practice has proven that complex creative skills can be mastered if you're willing to do the work. Whether Waking From Innocent Dreams ultimately finds commercial success, the decade spent learning fiction craft has been invaluable, and those skills will serve every story I tell from here forward.