How to Keep It Simple So Your Subconscious Can Shine
Marne Litfin on crafting "Daisies," the trans dirtbag road trip buddy comedy they always wanted to write
A few weeks ago, I wrote a craft analysis of Marne Litfin’s “Daisies” — a near-perfect story about a near-perfect day at the beach.
For this issue, Marne was kind enough to sit down with me and share the twists and turns of their journey in writing this story, their ingeniously simple plotting method, and what I got right versus where I fell a bit wide of the mark. It was a pleasure speaking with them, and I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did.
PS: Tell me about your initial inspiration for “Daisies.” How did the idea for this story first come to you?
ML: I would say from the first draft to the final published version took about two years. For the original draft, the prompt was that I wanted to write a story about a baby. I’d been a nanny for a while. I started writing about a baby that I had babysat for in Germany, because I lived in Germany for many years. I was trying to write this story about going to this beach with this baby I used to take care of. I had taken the baby to the beach and learned that many German baby girls don’t wear bathing suits the way they do here. Infants and young girls wear just bikini bottoms, or just bathing suit bottoms, at the beach. Kids do that until they’re eight or nine. The German parents I met were like, yeah we actually find baby bikinis to be really upsetting. So I tried to write this story, but it didn't go anywhere, because I didn’t really have anything other than: isn’t it crazy that German babies don’t wear bikinis? It didn't make any sense.
Then I started writing a really tortured story about a young girl who wants to wear a boy’s bathing suit at a swimming pool. It was a child character, a nine- or ten-year-old, who was really self-loathing at a pool with her family. It was just a really sad story. And it wasn’t interesting, it didn’t really go anywhere.
Then I had a meeting with Torrey Peters, the author of Detransition, Baby. I was a student at the University of Michigan MFA program, and she came here and read some student work. She read this draft of mine, and I told her I felt really embarrassed to have her read it, and I didn’t really know why. I could tell that I wanted to stop writing for a cis, straight audience, but I didn’t know what that meant on a craft level. I didn’t have language to describe what I was doing and what I wanted to stop doing.
And I had this conversation with her that really changed the course of my writing. One of the things she asked was: what do you actually want to be writing about? And I was like: I always wanted to write a trans road trip buddy comedy. She was like: well, why don’t you just write that? We talked about a lot of other things too, like that trans characters aren’t just trans when they’re struggling with their identities and thinking about bathing suits. You are trans when you are brushing your teeth and trans when you are driving. The act of zeroing in on these moments of body shame can be really limiting and not true to the experience of being a trans person, which I am.
After working on this very tortured draft for a year and a half, I had this meeting with her and I thought about it for a few months. Then I kind of just spat out this brand new story of these two trans dirtbags. The only thing I kept from the original draft was one flashback scene where one of the characters was like: oh yes, I used to be a sad little girl at the pool, wanting to wear a boy’s bathing suit. Electric Lit accepted the story and Halimah Marcus, who edited it, was like: I wonder how this story would work without that flashback? It was the last vestige of the original draft and we cut it out. That is how the story that you read made it into the world.
PS: I love that. Once you had the idea for this Ocean City version, what did the rest of your writing process look like? Were there other stages that it went through to reach its final form?
ML: The version that’s published is very close to the draft that fell out of me once I was like: oh, I’m going to write the story I actually want to write. Which is fairly atypical, but every story I’ve written has had its completely unique process. Every time I feel like I have established some kind of a process, I surprise myself the next time. After a year and a half of just moving sentences around this tragic story, that draft fell out of me in two weeks, start to finish.
I always have one of my ex-girlfriends read everything, and she offered some notes. I gave it to a professor mentor to look at. Then a friend said it was ready to go, which is not typical for me at all.
I needed to fart around for a long time, and wait around in this mess. I couldn’t have gotten there any other way. But it was very frustrating to be working on this really tragic, sad story that made me feel miserable for so long. I’d just tinker at the sentence level but never really change anything.
I learned a lot about revision while I was editing this story, because it was the first story that I ever rewrote and just completely reimagined. I had never been that audacious with my revisions. Working on this story really taught me something about needing to dream a little bigger, or be more open to radical shifts in the drafting process.
PS: What are some other typical parts of your process that you like to come back to, when lightning isn’t striking?
ML: Complaining? If I’m not complaining, I’m not breathing.
I have a time goal for writing. I try to have my butt in the chair for two 90-minute sessions a day. If I meet the time goal, then I don’t really stress about where I’m at or how it’s going. Everything always seems to get figured out eventually, just by virtue of turning off my devices and sitting quietly. I try to trust in that.
Lately, a thing that has been working for me has been to stop reading and listen to music, and listen to interviews with musicians about how they put together songs. That’s been helpful for me as a way of thinking about craft and process, without having anyone else’s prose in my head necessarily.
PS: Do you have any podcasts or episodes that, if someone else wanted to try that, would be a good entry point?
ML: It feels so unique and specific and precious to me that I don’t know that it would be helpful for anyone else? But I do listen to Song Exploder pretty religiously, as a jumping off point. It’s a great podcast where the interviewer removes themselves from the process. You just get to hear the artist speak at length for twenty minutes or half an hour about all the decisions that went into putting a song together, and what they were hoping to do. Hearing about other artists’ processes is really generative for me because it reminds me that there’s no one way, there’s no magic way. There are a ton of different ways to feed the machine.
PS: In my craft deep dive, I mentioned a scene that feels to me like an excellent visual metaphor for the emotional terrain of this story. The narrator is swept under the ocean and tumbling in the murky water. But then they do find the bottom and stand easily enough, and Miller is already upright, floating like a beacon a few feet away. When in the process did this scene come to you? How were you thinking about its role in the story as you were writing?
ML: I really wanted to write a story that had a plot. That was the thing that was really important to me. When I wrote this story, I was like: I am going to move from plot point to plot point. I am going to write a story in which things happen. I’m not writing a quiet MFA story, I want action.
I just put these two characters in the car and kept asking myself what would happen next. A great piece of advice that I got from another ex-girlfriend, who is also a writer, is that when you get stuck, sometimes it’s really helpful to make a menu of all the things that could happen. Once the characters were at the beach, I brainstormed a list of: what do you do when you get to the beach? Then I picked the one that seemed most interesting, and that was how I moved through every scene of the story.
I thought these characters would feel overwhelmed, then they would go sit down on the beach, then they would probably go swimming. That’s what I do when I’m at the beach, that seems right. It was just: what do I think should happen next? That sounds good, I’ll try it. It sounds so dumb when I say it out loud. But that’s really all I did on this one.
There’s a note that I did get, once I had spat out this new draft. The main character is confronted by this group of women on the beach that think the main character is being domestic violence’d by their friend. There’s multiple layers of misgendering happening. There’s the threat of this sisterhood situation. And in the draft that I gave to a friend, my friend said after that scene, the main character doesn’t think about that moment anymore. I had to go back and add in notes of the character looking over their shoulder, and wanting to move further away, and having residual anxiety about that moment.
I think the best stories I’ve written are ones where I’m not thinking so much about emotions or scenes or anything, where I keep the process as dumb as possible. Where I’m like: what should happen next? If I can let my subconscious do it, my subconscious just seems a lot smarter than I am.
PS: I love that. Do you write sequentially? Because I have the hardest time doing that, things come to me in every order.
ML: I would love to be someone who didn’t write sequentially, because I tend to get stuck in the same places when I’m drafting something new. I always get stuck on page 4, then again on page 7, and then again on 11, in every draft I’ve ever written.
PS: Do you have a sense of what should be happening on those pages, like a beat or a turning point? Like, by page 4, we’re always done with the introductions?
ML: I know something has to happen, but I don’t know what it is yet. The story needs an engine at that point, but I haven’t figured out what it will be.
PS: One of my central patterns that I read into this story was Miller-as-beacon, and a thing that pointed me in that direction was the light imagery in the story was for me one of the most memorable things. There’s a line: “As we rolled off the Atlantic City Expressway, the sky spread out for us. Blue, blue blue; light, high and hopeful, like the sun had gone for a ride in a balloon that would never come down.” And the contrasting darkness when Miller drops them home at the end of the day. I was tempted to read this as more evidence of Miller-as-beacon, a source of light both literal and figurative. How were you thinking about the lighting in this story, and any other imagery you wanted to include?
ML: That’s all so nice, that’s so kind and generous. I love your reading, it’s so thoughtful. It’s such a blessing to be read in this way. I never imagined anyone would read anything, so thank you.
I didn’t really think about it. I have driven to Ocean City. All of my stories are set in places that I have been to or lived in, and I almost always write setting first. When I start a new story, I almost always think: where do I want to go, in my mind? Where do I want to be living, for the next few weeks or months? Driving from Philadelphia to Ocean City, the sky does open up like that. You are in a metropolis, and then the sky just completely opens and there’s nothing except the ocean.
I think pairing the freedom of the ocean with the main character’s best friend, it’s not intentional, but they go together nicely. They complement each other. But I wasn’t thinking about any of that. I was just thinking: keep describing Miller and keep describing the beach.
Any time I have tried to actively be like: and now, I will use the setting to underline a certain part of this person’s character, it’s bad. It just comes out really clumsy. The less thinking I’m doing, the better.
PS: So I guess it’s more me coming in and saying: Ah, so many patterns!
ML: You’re not wrong, it’s wonderful. But I’m definitely not sitting at my desk being like: and now, I will invent a pattern!
PS: The story gets its title from daisies, which are the pattern on Miller’s tiny, black, flamboyant speedo swim trunks. How were you thinking about daisies, picking that pattern specifically as the story came together? And how did you know this would be the title?
ML: It is one of the only details taken from real life in this story. I have a friend who had that exact bathing suit. It’s an amazing bathing suit. I was thinking: this bathing suit is one of the great joys of being alive, getting to witness my friend wearing this bathing suit.
I’m interested in writing stories about joy. In You’ve Got Mail, Meg Ryan talks about how daisies are her favorite flower because they’re so friendly. Which is a line that has stuck with me since I was eleven years old and watching rom-coms.
I also took a workshop with Morgan Talty, who wrote Night of the Living Rez, and he talked about the fact that it’s often helpful to have titles that reference specific objects because they give the reader something to hold on to. They’re often more evocative than titles that have themes in them or that don’t have any specific imagery. I’ve found that to be true. It was advice that I really liked.
I like thinking about these two characters as happy little flowers. Even though the main character is obviously not a happy little flower.
PS: The way I like to scan stories for a pattern is looking for a high stakes moment. What I love about this story, what gives it a lot of its bright energy, is that most of it is pretty low stakes. But there is that conversation that happens right before the women interrupt them. It cuts off right where the narrator is wondering about bigger picture life questions that aren’t going to get answered on this day, about whether to go on T or not. Because who would they ask, if not Miller? Do you have any more thoughts about that moment, that question that they were bringing into the day?
ML: I read the wonderful analysis that you wrote, and this was really the one place where I felt like my understanding of the story feels completely different. For me the stakes of the story, really the high point, is when they’re in the car on the way home and they see the family of deer. And Miller says: the murder should want to take you to the beach.
One thing I had in my mind was that I wanted to write a story about a failing relationship without having the relationship on the page at all. I really wanted the story to hold the tension of being in a doomed relationship without doing anything in scene on the page.
All the things that Miller and the narrator talk about — about their bodies and transness and hormones and surgeries and scars and all of that — those are things that just come up in conversations with my trans friends, those are normal things that we talk about. I wanted to be faithful to the fact that those conversations do happen. But I didn’t write this as a story about whether a character should transition or not, or [go on] hormones or not, or [have] surgery or not. I was more interested in writing a story about what happens when two trans masc characters are hanging out, with this really big tension hanging over one of the character’s heads that they’re not talking about at all.
PS: For me, those two things felt a little related by the fact that Miller’s life is just going better. They have a really great relationship with a hot, attentive woman. They’ve been taking T longer and it works out really great for them. Miller’s doing better in both of these domains, relationship and knowing how T works out for them. In my mind, both of those fell under “beacon.”
ML: Yes, for sure. But also, it was important to me to include this note of the narrator asking Miller if they’re ever worried that Priscilla is going to leave them. And Miller being like: yeah, it’s all I think about. It was important for me to include that as a nod to [the fact that] the narrator’s assessment of how Miller’s life is going is not fully accurate. The sense that everything is going better for Miller is just another one of the narrator’s problems.
PS: I have a friend who had honed in on that moment as well. Like, is Miller’s model of masculinity the only one? Or as rosy as it seems? That came up as we were talking about the story. How beacon-y of a model of masculinity is Miller? How perfect, really, is that?
ML: There are little holes, if you look for them, I think.
PS: Yeah, and I’m me, I’m a cis woman. There are certainly going to be resonances that I might not catch as well as a trans person would.
Is there anything that I haven’t asked yet that you would like to speak to? About the story, or how you crafted it, or anything else that’s come up for you as we’ve been talking?
ML: One of my great inspirations the past couple of years has been Annie Ernaux. I really love the work that she does so much. Just her project — of documenting her people, and trying to look for truth in ordinary moments of life, and to really put her life under a microscope essentially — has been really inspiring to me. That is what I am thinking about when I sit down to write: looking at the conversations that happen in my regular life and saying something more true about them.
PS: Do you have a particular work of hers that’s one of your favorites?
ML: Simple Passion. Everyone should read Simple Passion. It’s 80 or 90 pages and it will haunt and wreck you. There are not that many books that I think about after I read them. I think about this book all the time.
PS: What are you working on next?
ML: I’m working on a story right now about a young woman who is in a fight with her best friend, about whether or not she should sell her eggs, while they are at a Tegan and Sara concert in 2007.
And I’m trying to finish a collection. I just finished the last story in a collection that is about mostly dirtbag, horny lesbians who make terrible life choices and keep ruining their own lives, in the period from 1997 to 2007.
PS: You’ve mentioned dirtbag before, also in reference to the characters in “Daisies.” Maybe this is the perfect note to close on. What does dirtbag mean to you?
ML: I am interested in queerness as a marker of downward mobility. I’m interested in this brand of queerness that is really not interested in the trappings of the middle class existence. Queerness as a way of saying no to homeownership and children and economic precarity. Also, embracing being kind of gross.
People are so invested in respectability politics. The whole marriage movement was about being absorbed into this mainstream culture.
I’ve always taken so much more inspiration from queer people who thumb their noses at that. I would rather live on the margins. It’s a much more interesting place to live.
And I embrace the parts of me that are just absolutely disgusting.
Marne Litfin is a writer and cartoonist whose stories, art, and essays can be found at Electric Lit, Joyland, Gulf Coast, on The Moth Radio Hour, and elsewhere. Their work has been supported by Lambda Literary, Tin House, Storyknife, and the Helen Zell Writers' Program at the University of Michigan. Say hi at marnelitfin.com.
Preety Sidhu is an associate editor at Electric Literature and writes Lit in One Sentence on Substack. For two years, she led a national writing conference that hosted over 600 manuscript consultations with literary agents and editors annually. She earned her MFA in fiction from Louisiana State University, where she served on the editorial team at The Southern Review. Before that, she taught math at independent schools in the New York and Boston areas for many years.
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