Building Castles Analysis

‘Building Castles’ is a romance that follows the journey of Cynthia Starling as she trawls through her past romantic entanglements, trying to glean information about where she keeps going wrong in relationships. Reaching just over 12000 words, it’s a short story that tells the tale of the lengths a woman will go to, to get over a broken heart in the hopes of finding a happy ending and her very own fairy-tale.

My very first idea sprung out at me from a line in a song by P!nk, “What about all the broken happy ever afters?” This line struck a chord with me and it made me consider the amount of young men and women that deal with love, heartache and rejection every day and how often it can affect your direction in life or your other relationships.
Although it has these aspects of a coming of age story, it is a romance, as shown through the many conventions and connections that this piece uses. I used certain stock characters, mainly the different love interests of Cynthia. These characters not only represented different typical people, for example the character of Alex that is very much the ‘jock’ typecast, but on another layer, they also symbolise different deadly sins, as Alex also represents ‘greed’. Another common theme in romances it that actions are guided by emotions, for example, running away from a man because you project your own self-doubt and fear onto him. My character starts relationships with men purely because they make her feel better about herself, which is the equivalent of doing something because of certain emotions. The biggest thing that puts my story into romance is the problem for the character to overcome. Each individual relationship that is examined in my story has secondary characters that try and break up the relationship, friends, parents and so forth, and this is a regular thread in many romances. These are all traditional conventions that more closely represent a classic romance, the main difference between my tale and a more archetypal approach, is that the aims and outcome at the end of my piece differ. The end goal of the story is for Cynthia to find her way on her own and learn from her mistakes, instead of the finding her Prince Charming. Although the signature ending of a romance puts the main character into a loving relationship, I felt that for this particular character, insinuating that she needs her prince to make her happy, would’ve been a mistake. There is already a catalogue of her bad dealings in romance and so if she had just jumped