Look at it this way

 You ever hear of working a problem backwards?
I can't remember the exact wording for it, but it's when you're having trouble with any given problem and decide to work at it from the opposite direction. I'd like to say that I had tried this before with things, but actually I haven't. Not until today.
 I tried to break a tried and true method for writing a story, and as a result have been stuck on this story for more than two years. Yesterday during church, I had a realization.

I'm writing my story backwards.

Not just, how I'm doing it, but the fact that the ending is all I have, is actually my beginning. And my beginning, is the ending. I tried to start a story where it didn't begin, and the further I'd go back, the more it seemed to be an ending. But the moment I turned this story around, and have started working at it from the opposite side, it's falling into place. Slowly, and then all at once. The way the story is meant to be written, I have been fighting to try and find for years, and now it seems that it's falling together so lovely.

 This does mean that I have to start over, and have to work at it in a completely different manner, but now I know what to do.

 I tried to stuff these beautiful and grown, fully developed characters into a child's point of view in comparison to who they were. So not only am I starting at the end, it's a story being told.

 And not from the viewpoint I had intended. Indeed, this character wasn't even supposed to make it to the end of the story, when in reality of the situation, she's the main one, and almost essentially the only one to do so. But none of them unscathed.

 A vast majority of the book is dealing with internal struggles. Mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. The thing is, if you work from your ending as your beginning, and begin to tell it backwards, eventually you'll reach the middle, and it'll start all over again. So you'll have an ending that tells how the story began, and a beginning that shows how the story ends. All in all, I'd like to think that this is how I intended it to be from the beginning since it's birth, but that would be a lie. This was originally supposed to be a short story written by a twelve year old, who wasn't sure what she was doing, but just wrote down every word she thought of, whether it was chronological or not. She just wrote. Pounding on the keys all day, till she ended up with a story that turned into a full blown saga right before her eyes. But it had become to big for her mind to fully grasp. The very ideas that had been flown from her fingers couldn't be managed all at once by her mind. And so, there is now a point to this story.

 I had found once that stories showed me that anything could be overcome. So what I did, I decided to write stories about people overcoming what I feared. People dealing with things that I was afraid might or would happen to me. So that's how a lot of things began when it came to my first time developing a character. If a character had ways to deal with it and to overcome it, then I could too. Although sometimes you might wonder, well, you're writing the story so how does it work? I don't know. And honestly, I don't know half of the words I'm about to type until I'm halfway down the page.

 I give myself a point a, and a point b, but from then on out, it's fair game baby. Anything goes. So at age 12, and in under a month I had written my very first draft of this highly complex and strange story, with over fifty thousand words. To me at that point I had no clue what NaNoWriMo, or what the making and editing and designing of a novel really was. Because I was just writing a story. That's all I was going, and that's all I'm still doing.

 I had become so intent on breaking the rules, that I rarely came to even learn them. But the more of them that I learned, the more I tried to follow, till once again I came over a road block.

 Some people hate seeing a sentence begin with a conjunction. And so with that, I began using it as much as I could because I hated long sentences that just seemed to run on and on, unless they had a point to them, or had one long well flowing thought. Think of Jane Austen who had a tendency to write extremely long sentences in her novels. And other writers would be as blunt and as concise as they could possibly be.

 My stories are not driven by word counts, or anything that hardly any published author has said they're stories are driven by.

 Mine are driven by me wanting to overcome my fears. Since I became a teenager I slowly like any other person began to see the world around me in a completely different light, and honestly the news channels don't help all that much when you're trying to not get scared of the world. So, to me, what was a better way to deal with fears than to have people overcome them. But from there it blossomed on and on again and went and grew further and further till I had no idea where it actually began. Until I looked at the pot it had begun growing in. My heart. I could say my mind, but that's not true.

 Nothing of me has ever started in my head except for my troubles. My heart has led me true every time I can remember. Fears are generated not from my heart, that is where hope is built. That's where hope has been founded and grown.

 I thanked God daily for the stories that had been put in my heart, and then slowly for some reason I stopped. Because I was fighting them. I tried to turn them into something they weren't, over and over again. So I honestly had no clue what I was doing for years.

 I still don't, but I'm trying this time to go the way it needs to go. My characters bloomed forth from the heart of an adventurer. A princess, a hopeless romantic and a girl who grew up seeing a world through rose colored glasses. So that's unapologetic-ally the world I wished to portray in them. Because it's there. A world with rose colored glasses, but without the glasses. There is a world where there's beauty. But not everybody chooses to see it.

 That feeling you get when a child runs up and hugs you.

 That sense you get from a wonderful breakfast in the middle of summer. 

 The feeling of rain on your face while the sun is still shining.

 The uplifting thing in your heart that you just can't deny that come up and out of you whenever you see what the world truly is.

 We are the world, because we're what's on it.

 We're the people who inhabit this life.

 Trust me when I say that life is so much more. 

 So much more than all the pain that the news and other people try to say it is.

 There is so much more.

 The laughter of you and friends at a park.

 The feeling of that first jump into the pool for summer.

 Having coffee downtown with a friend.

 Just being in life the way it should be.

Our lives weren't made to be lived in fear, for we have not been given spirits of fear, but of power and of love, and a sound mind.