This month, we’re going to look at “Reclaimed” by Leo Johnson, specifically how setting is used to create a richer story. This story is, in fact, almost only about the setting as the town of Drayton is the central character. Although not all stories will use the place (village, town, city, school, hospital, etc.) as a main character, often stories are so steeped in their setting that the setting is almost a character in itself. I suppose the best way to think of it is: could the story take place anywhere else? If not, the setting is integral to the story and therefore should feature prominently.
The opening sentence of “Reclaimed” is fairly neutral: ‘Drayton had been around for nearly two centuries.’ However, what you do get is an English-sounding name, and the town has been around for 200 years. A nice short sentence to pull the reader in. Then, this sentence follows:
Nestled into a small valley in the hills of northeast Alabama, it had waxed and waned over the years, burgeoning for a while thanks to the cotton mill and good jobs.
The verb choices in this second sentence are excellent: nestled, waxed and waned, and burgeoning. It would’ve been easy to make weaker or blander choices, such as: The town was on a small valley (replacing a verb with a preposition). Or: the size of the town had grown and shrunk. And the most obvious synonym for burgeoning is thriving, which, in itself, is not a weak verb, but burgeoning is so much stronger.
The rest of the paragraph reads as follows:
Diminishing to nearly nothing when the mill closed and the men from the railroad tore up the tracks that ran through town. That void, where the tracks once were, was a wound. A festering, stinking wound.
The second half of the paragraph also makes good use of verbs – tore up – but what I’d like to draw your attention to is the metaphor: the void, where once the railroad tracks were, ‘was a wound’. And not a normal wound, but a ‘festering, stinking wound’.
The opening paragraph alone tells the reader so much about the town: how old it is, what kind of jobs there were, and what happened to it once those jobs were no longer available. This, in turn, is also a kind of foreshadowing for the further darkness in the story.
There is more good description in the second paragraph, and in the third paragraph, the stakes are raised with: ‘Then the kudzu crept in.’ Ironically, ‘[t]he dying town was resurgent with life, just not in a way that anyone wanted.’ The inhabitants tried to fight back, but ‘lawnmowers had their gears snarled by the vines’ and ‘[w]eed killers had little effect’. The residents thought they’d solved the problem by letting goats ‘strip the vines bare’ but then the stakes are upped again when ‘[o]ne by one, the [goats] dropped dead.’
Where at first the town is described as a character, now the vine is also described as a character. ‘It was greedy, ravenous, all-consuming’ until ‘[l]ike a sylvan Vesuvius, it covered Drayton.’
In the following paragraph, the stakes are pushed higher again, suggesting that ‘[s]ome people saw it as a punishment.’ Why did they see it as a punishment? It transpires that the inhabitants, or their ancestors, ‘had done evil in those hills and all over the South’ and ‘[t]o found Drayton, the original inhabitants had to be done away with.’ Each transgression throughout the paragraph is worse, culminating in ‘[t]he blood of the enslaved had seeped so deeply into the ground that it turned the very soil red.’
In the final paragraph, Johnson pans out, suggesting ‘[t]here’s not a moral component to it’ and ‘[e]verything has to come to an end. Even the town of Drayton.’ And in the final two sentences, the two main characters – the town and the kudzu – are both acknowledged: ‘Maybe it was Drayton’s time to be buried. Maybe it was the kudzu’s time to flourish?’
“Reclaimed” is a great example of how to use setting to enhance your story. Use strong verbs and specific details – large or small – to richly evoke place and try using a metaphor if you can. Be consistent so your place feels as solid and well-rounded as your character(s), and make sure you keep raising the stakes to keep your reader reading!
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