R&S! Presents: Feelings Are Bound Up in Place: A Focus on Setting

Feelings Are Bound Up in Place: A Focus on Setting with Rob Costello

Character and setting are inextricably bound together. As writers, we can get to know our characters better by understanding their world and how they feel about it. Thinking deeply about your setting can unearth a great deal of information about your characters’ identity. It can illuminate their fears, desires, and insecurities, and clarify why they think, feel, and act the way they do.

The best writers use their settings as a means to reveal the inner lives of their characters to the reader. They do this by creating a dynamic relationship between place and person that is as psychologically complex and emotionally resonant as the relationships the characters have with one another. Knowing your characters’ feelings about the world around them is as important as knowing how they feel about the other people in the book. Showing your reader how they respond to their environment tells us a great deal about who they are as individuals.

In this sixty minute, lecture-style course, join Rob Costello as he examines the role of setting in shaping our characters. We’ll study mentor texts to explore how different authors utilize setting to reveal the inner lives of their characters. We’ll also discuss how to “interrogate your setting” to reveal new information about your characters and deepen the reader experience of your story.

Rob Costello (he/him) writes dark speculative and contemporary fiction with a queer bent for and about young people. He’s the contributing editor of We Mostly Come Out At Night: 15 Queer Tales of Monsters, Angels & Other Creatures, nominated for a 2024 Bram Stoker Award® and named a 2024 CYBILS Award Finalist, a 2025 Locus Award Finalist, and a 2025 Lambda Literary Award Finalist, as well as a 2025 YALSA Quick Pick for Reluctant Readers, and a Notable/Recommended/Best Book of 2024 by the New York Public Library, Ginger Nuts of Horror, PseudoPod, Reactor Magazine, and Locus Magazine. He’s also author of the dark fiction story collection The Dancing Bears: Queer Fables for the End Times, named a finalist for The Whirling Prize. His stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and have appeared in The Dark, The NoSleep Podcast, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, PseudoPod, Hunger Mountain, Cape Cod Review, and Narrative, among other publications.

An Ugly World for Beautiful Boys is his debut novel.

An alumnus of Millay Arts, Rob holds an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and has served on the faculty of the Highlights Foundation since 2014. He is co-founder (with Lesa Cline-Ransome, Jo Knowles, and Jennifer Richard Jacobson) of the R(ev)ise and Shine! writing community, and he lives in upstate NY with his husband and their four-legged overlords.

Learn more at: www.cloudbusterpress.com.