With our Nightmare on Story Street contest announcement today, we thought this would be a good time to publish our interview with Jessica Wooton, the winner of our Summertime Sadness 100-Word Story Contest.
Her story “Slate (Clean)” is a remarkably tight and punctual work. Wooton efficiently builds a character in a still-life moment that lasts perhaps five seconds. Then, in the final lines, she turns the moment into a story spanning years or even decades.
Every Story Street Writer had a say in the final round, and even in a field of talented writers with impactful stories, “Slate (Clean)” was the clear winner.
This discussion was lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
SSW: Congratulations, Jessica! What a fantastic bit of work “Slate (Clean)” is. It was a joy to read, and I think I read it five or six times. Please tell us a bit about yourself.
Wooton: Thank you so much, and it was a great surprise. There’s not much to say about me!
SSW: What drew you to writing?
Wooton: I’ve been writing or telling stories in some form for over twenty years. I’ve always been drawn to what-if’s or strange tracks of thought. Or how to catch a moment and describe it in a way that makes sense to other people. Stories have always felt like an easier way to convey information to other people than trying to explain.
SSW: “Slate (Clean)” is a delightfully unconventional 100-word piece. It tells a years-long story with only a few seconds of action and six words of dialogue. Please comment on your creative process from concept to submission.
Wooton: For Slate (Clean), I really wanted to distill a moment in time and capture a specific voice while doing it. It started as a base story of confronting a spouse over a dirty glass and the challenge of it being “evidence” of an affair. I needed a way to convey that Dana, the main character, was precise and meticulous, almost overbearing in her neatness. I wanted to convey that there was a level of intrusive thoughts in how she looked at the world, analyzing and breaking down minute details for “evidence.” So there are two ways to read the story: you can read it straight or you can skip over the parentheticals, which has a flow to it despite still being categorized and organized. But I wanted those extra descriptors in the parentheticals to act like interruptions, yanking someone out of the flow of the rest of the story to focus on them whenever they showed up. The first draft looked very different from the final draft, and I spent a lot of time playing with the best places to interrupt.
SSW: Your point about how “Slate (Clean)” reads differently without the parentheticals is interesting. This came up in our discussion during the final round. Skipping the parentheticals alters the rhythm, of course, and it becomes a very different story. The moment passes so quickly, and the parentheticals give it time to breathe.
In the first reading, I noticed that the narration shifts from a very close third-person perspective to an almost indeterminate narrative voice. Really, as a person who reads meticulously to study craft, I find this amazing. Can you talk about this craft decision?
Wooton: A lot of character and point-of-view work is about the details and how that character sees the world. The details that went into the parentheticals were the details would the character notice about the things around her, while the descriptors outside the parentheticals are all generic, which takes away that voice/point-of-view to some degree. I also made an effort to differentiate descriptors that were applied to her and her “things” in the connotations of the words – cherry-red (general connotations of sexy), lemon (clean scent), gauzy (transparent), while descriptions of other things were set to have different connotations plum (like a bruise), obscured (blocked, not transparent), hung-over (general connotation of wobbly/unsteady), etc. So there are a lot of loaded words used as description, where the personality really comes out – and again, character voice/personality comes out in the things she chooses to focus on.
SSW: When you write a short piece like this, what is your process? Planning, drafting, editing?
Wooton: For short pieces, I let my mind loop around in circles on a topic or a scene that I really like, or something I want to get across. Once I figure out something I want to say or a metaphor I want to play with, I work from there. For this, I really wanted to play with the word “dirty” – dirty as in actual cleanliness and dirty as in the behavior. This part tends to take the longest because it gives me key pieces of a story – what’s the end goal, where am I taking this? From there, I tend to get a first draft together pretty quickly with my only goal being to get a beginning, middle, and end in and keep it pretty close to my word count. This one probably took me about 30 minutes to throw together the first draft. I’m largely an exploratory writer for the first draft where I have an idea of what I want it to do and I find how it ends. The majority of the work is in editing – “Okay, I’ve got an ending I like. Now how do I lean into that ending?”
For 100 words, it’s a lot of tinkering with word choice and punctuation. I throw it at my writing friends and ask them what’s missing at this point, and always get some great suggestions. I have some great friends who will happily toss a 100-word story back and forth with me until I say I’m done. I spend a ton of time in the editing phase for 100 words because everything has to be meticulously put together for it to work. Don’t even ask how many times I went back and forth on D-I-V-O-R, and DIVOR -> I landed on the separation between them because I really wanted it to be read letter by letter to slow down and draw focus.
SSW: Thanks. That’s a great answer. Your D-I-V-O-R example turns the writers’ adage “every word faces a firing squad” up to eleven.
Please tell us about any formal writing education you have?
Wooton: I don’t have much in the way of formal writing education itself. I’ve taken a few writing workshops at the Harvard Extension School for fun, when I worked in a research lab there. The majority of my relevant education came from having a minor in theater. I was more in the costume design section, but a lot of both the acting I did and the costume design was focused on character work and looking at how details bring a character off the page, or how to use people’s assumptions to say something without saying it.
SSW: Do you have other support in your writing?
Wooton: As far as other support, my wife has a graduate degree in publishing and she comes around and tells me when I’m doing too much rule breaking and takes a look at my work before anyone else. Generally, she pulls my ideas back into balance when I’m getting too deep. I also have an excellent group of curated writing friends, like I said above. We toss drafts back and forth and argue crafty things all the time. One of them was actually responsible for convincing me not to scrap “Slate (Clean)” when it wasn’t doing what I wanted, so they’re pretty awesome!
SSW: What are your goals and aspirations for your writing?
Wooton: I actually have a novel out on submission right now, so I’m hoping for some good news soon! I’m currently also having a lot of fun in the short story space in my spare time. It’s always a pleasure to have a piece published and accepted somewhere and to have more people read it, whatever form it takes. I hope to write something that resonates with an audience.
SSW: If you don’t mind, can you have a read of your story and tell us if you see any edits you’d make? Also, how do you know when a piece is done?
Wooton: That “(linear)” in the third paragraph got edited in and out a bunch of times, and right now, I’m in a phase where I’d probably edit it out again.
Which ties right into that last question – when I’m adding and removing the same comma or word. Or when I’m changing a word back and forth between two options, it’s done. At that point, I know I’m not going to make any more substantial changes.
SSW: I had no idea you were part of the Harvard writing program. Our group started right there in Cambridge, at 8 Story Street.
Jessica Wooton, thank you so much for your story, and congratulations again on your selection as our top Summertime Sadness 100-Word Story.
When he's not swimming or paddling in the ocean, Jack works on his current project, We, a novel of love, loss, vengeance, and peace. An excerpted chapter of We has been published in Harvard's The Brattle Street Review. He also writes the twice monthly column "A Work in Progress" for Story Street Writers.
- SSW Interview of Our Summertime Sadness 100-Word Story Contest Winner - September 1, 2025
- A Work in Progress: Year One - April 8, 2025
- What I Learned Judging a Flash Fiction Contest - November 14, 2024
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