Don't Kill Your Darlings: James Cagney, Little Girl Giant, and Kellogg's Corn Flakes

We painted the kitchen on Stu’s forty-seventh lockdown this past Xmas. It took a month, full-time as our kitchen is a post-war mishmosh of nooks and crannies. Gather and surmise:

While we had all the cupboards off, I took the opportunity to dejunk every one of them. I threw out so much shit, and donated even more. Among the stuff that went to Valoooo Villlaahge were about a dozen coffee mugs that had been given to me over the years. I whittled it down to about eight. I mostly drink wine out of them, as I always make my tea in a giganto go-mug because I forget about it for hours on end.

There are three mugs I cannot let go of, though none of them is safe for drinking anything.

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Back when Teh Intarwebs were hardly a thing, I published a book about James Cagney. It was 2001 and it was my first book. I can’t remember how, but I found someplace that would put a photo on a mug for you. I know this is as common as dirt now, but back then, it cost like $800 and had to come from Bora Bora or somewhere. I had his photo put on the mug you see above, and which I used until last Thursday. Of course it’s been through the dishwasher 600 times, and it’s hard to tell who that even is any more. But I know.

The last time we painted this kitchen, my goddaughter’s mom and I did it in 1993 (I’m assuming from 21-28 July). I remember writing this inside a particularly large and unwieldy drawer (think 38 cans of beans stacked two high. Post-war rationing, we think. This kitchen has more pantries than you’ve had hot dinners). Though I painted these words, I wasn’t aware of James Cagney in any real sense. I may have heard his name, but it wasn’t till I went to University that I found out who he was and started writing about him. I don’t believe in premonitions, but come on.

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Any sensible person would have thrown the mug out when it broke. I am not a sensible person. I’m also not precious about objects. But when that mug broke last week, I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away. I’d been using any old mug for my current task (and the task I’ve had since last year): cutting and shaping the jewelry wire for the masks my mom makes. She’s made over 3500, and I estimate I’ve shaped the wire for 1500 of those. I figured that just because something can’t be used for its intended purpose, doesn’t mean it can’t be used.

Stu and I went to Liverpool in the summer of 2014 to see the Giant Puppets that hugely influenced the characters in my sixth book, Nuala: A Fable. I bought this mug at the gift shop down at the Liver Building and for seven years, it’s been my wine-sipping receptacle of choice. Until I cut my lip on it and realized it had a huge chip. This one caused me real pain. That trip was … I’ll just exaggerate and make clichés if I try to describe it. I had some meaningless mug full of pens and bookmarks on my desk. I gave that one away, and replaced it with this. Now I can see Little Girl Giant and her dog Xolo any time I like, even though I can no longer drink from that mug.

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In 1983 (after high school), a friend and I backpacked across Europe for four months (do young people still do that? I hope so). We were eighteen, and she had a boyfriend who was living on a base at Baden Baden at the time. Halfway through our trip, we landed on his doorstop, tired from trains and cheap, bad food and shitty hotels. We holed up at his place for a week, me sleeping on the couch. It was the Waldorf Astoria compared to the fleabags we’d been flopping in from London to Paris and all points in between.

I liked this guy a lot. His marriage to my friend didn’t last, but I still think really fondly of him. I don’t know if he’s dead or alive. But I see that I was drawing the Beatles for him when I was eighteen, as I don’t have the (obviously my) sketch of Paul on the coffee table.

For reasons I don’t remember, he gave me this mug before we left for the south of Europe in November of 1983:

I have a faint memory of that as my favourite mug while I was there, and I imagine he gave it to me because he’d noticed. I’ve not been able to drink anything out of it for decades. Have you ever seen such a busted handle? Now I use it to hold my drawing pencils, as it’s so much easier to pull them out of the mug than dig them out of the case they came in.

I have no particular affinity for Corn Flakes. I can take them or leave them. But the memories of that trip and this kind man (he also gave me Yazoo’s two albums, which I still play) are so tied up with this mug that I’ll take it to the grave with me.

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Kill our darlings? In literary terms, it means to let go of the words that you’re most in love with: the phrases and characters and chapters you think you’ll die without but which aren’t serving the story. I’ve never thought that was a good idea. I think we can keep our darlings, and repurpose them. I wrote a character into Nuala that my editors and I all agreed was not fitting into the book. I didn’t kill her. I set her aside in a new file, and now she’s showing up in my sequel to that book.

No writing is a waste. Keep your darlings. Just be clear on what new purpose they can serve, now that they’re no longer part of your book.