” Fiction is Truth’s elder sister … no one in the world knew what truth was until some one had told a story.”
Advice to a sister-in-law
In Vermont, where Kipling, newly married, was living from 1892-1896, his sister-in-law, Josephine asked him for advice on writing. This is what he gave her:
Certain Observations On The Short Story – arranged for the use of Josephine Balestier by Rudyard Kipling
- The short story differs in every single particular from the novel of one two or three volumes and must be entered upon with this understanding.
- Everything should be said in from 5,000 to 10,000 words. After 12,000 the short story begins to lose its character.
- The short story needs a beginning, a middle, and an end even more than any other form of literature.
- Patent moralizing, obvious introspection, and the intrusion of a theory are all three out of place.
- There is a place for every word that you have occasion to use and it is your business to find that place and no other for every word.
- Quotations and dialect are as powerful as alcohol and should be employed just as frequently.
- When in doubt cut out.
- A tale is made to be read as well as written. Read it, therefore, aloud at every stage of its manufacture.
- No thought at the present stage of the world’s history is new enough to outweigh a clumsy sentence.
- There are times when it is necessary to call a spade a bloody shovel. There is no time when you or the spade are bettered by using the word “agricultural implement”.
- If you believe in the reality of what you are writing about, those who read will at least pay you a little attention.
- Every person who writes is born into the world with an inalienable right to acquire a style if he or she works for it. When getting a style see that you get your own and no one else’s. Plagiarism is inevitable but imitation, besides being a confession of weakness, is dishonest.
- Remember that you should be master and employer of your words and have a care that they do not master or use you.
- Humour is the gift of God. No one can be funny by sitting down to it: but the habit of charity is a great help.
- There is only one way in which a tale should be told and that is to make the reader believe that he has found it.
- Description of background. As your background is limited let your strokes be firm and full.
- The shortest word is the best word, except where it is borne in upon you that it is not.
- The Bible is the Parent of the Short Story as it should be: but you need not imitate the Bible.
- Everybody knows when he or she is writing an unusually good tale but it is not well to let this knowledge be apparent to the reader.
- Of all your stock in trade remember that experience is the chief. Better is the simplest history of an experience that you have lived through than the most ornate guess at probabilities.
- Experience being necessarily limited, it is worthwhile to know that sympathy will give you an extra substitute for experience.
- There is nothing in life too high or too low for the purposes of a story.
- The worst aid to story writing is the belief in any particular theory of story writing.
- Style should rise and fall with the subject as closely as a thermometer follows the temperature.
- In limited quantities every mannerism is effective. When the limit is overstepped it becomes affected.
- You may make light of all things in the world except Love, God, and Death.
- If you wish to know your own strength, omit the love-interest from a tale and see what happens.
- Be sincere at any and every cost.
- Be accurate to a scruple in the most casual allusion or inference or technical term for the world is full of specialists to catch you tripping.
- Don’t be afraid of anything in the world.
Craft and Labour
At a conference in Vermont in 2013, David Alan Richards, Kipling’s bibliographer, spoke of Kipling as a short story writer, and gave some more examples of what he had said about writing. Kipling’s emphasis on writing as a craft echoes this stern warning from T. S. Eliot (right), a former Vice President of the Kipling Society:The larger part of the labor of an author in composing his work is critical labor: the labor of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing: this frightful toil is as much critical as creative.
To Edward Lucas White in November 1893, using language he was later to employ for his sister-in-law, Kipling wrote:
Don’t go theorizing. Concreteness in expression is all very well if you happen to like it but consider how it may be a stumbling block to another make of mind. For myself I love not to hear a spade called a spade because there are so many varieties of spade; and so by preference I say when writing of such: a balance handle, cutting edge, Beaver Falls finishing or sod spade, as the case may be, but I can easily conceive how maddening that must be to a fellow who doesn’t care two damns for anything except agricultural implements in the mass. Every man is too apt to make the law of his temperament the fly wheel of all creation.
To the readers of “How the Whale Got His Tiny Throat” in the December 1897 St. Nicholas Magazine, he wrote in his introduction:
‘Some stories are meant to be read quietly and some stories are meant to be told aloud.’
To the Royal Academy in 1906, responding to the toast to ‘Literature’, he observed:
Witness, a thousand excellent, strenuous words can leave us quite cold or put us to sleep, whereas a bare half hundred words breathed upon by some man in his agony, or in his exaltation, or in his idleness, ten generations ago, can still lead whole nations into and out of captivity; can open to us the doors of the Three Worlds, or stir us so intolerably that we can scarcely abide to look at our own souls. It is a miracle – one that happens very seldom.
To the Royal Society of Literature in 1926, when awarded the society’s Gold Medal, he said:
The art that I follow is not an unworthy one. For Fiction is Truth’s elder sister. Obviously, no one in the world knew what truth was until some one had told a story. So it is the oldest of the arts, the mother of history, biography, philosophy … and, of course, of politics….[Y]ou can see writers raking the dumps of the English language for words that shall range farther, hit harder, and explode over a wider area than the service-pattern words in common use….Most of the Arts admit the truth that it is not expedient to tell everyone everything. Fiction recognizes no such bar. There is no human emotion or mood which it is forbidden to assault, there is no canon of reserve or pity that need be respected, in fiction.
To Augusta Twedell of Simla in 1888, who had sent him poems and a manuscript, Kipling warned, first quoting from a poem by Longfellow
‘That is best which lieth nearest/ Shape from that thy work of art’:
Don’t try to invent or fly off into other worlds. That is beginning at the wrong end. If you have invention, and believe me it is a very rare faculty, all the realities of all this world won’t put it out. Go simply and deliberately at the reality of this life as you see it, first. Note faces, turns of expressions, and conversations, exactly as you would put down sketches of tree-boles or gate posts ….From a business point of view not one of the things you have sent me is worth the paper it’s written on, but some of them are valuable as showing future promise.
To the Canadian Authors’Association in 1933, he remarked on another aspect of the writer’s use of his personal experiences in writing stories, and quoted the French Canadian carpenter who had literally built Naulahka:
It is with us [authors] as with timber. Every knot and shake in a board reveals some disease or injury that overtook the log when it was growing. A gentleman named Jean Pigeon, who once built a frame house for me, put this in a nutshell. He said: ‘Everything which a tree she has experienced in the forest she takes with her into the house.’ That is the law for us [authors] all, each in his or her land.