Rudyard Kipling: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn
1865 to 1936
Quick answer: Rudyard Kipling craft file: the frame narrator, cutting until the story is denser than sense, "The Man Who Would Be King", the Jungle Book tales, and what to steal.
Quick facts
- Born: 1865, Bombay
- Died: 1936, London, aged 70
- Wrote in: English
- Known for: "The Man Who Would Be King", The Jungle Book, "Lispeth"
- Signature move: A frame narrator who receives a story he cannot fully carry
- Start with: "The Man Who Would Be King" (1888)
Kipling published his first collection at twenty-two, written between deadlines on a Lahore newspaper, and kept writing stories for almost fifty years, from tales for children to some of the most compressed and difficult short fiction in English. His politics are a permanent argument; his technique is not. Nobody has been better at the story told to a listener.
What he actually does on the page
He puts a frame around the tale so that the telling is part of the story. "The Man Who Would Be King" (1888) begins in a newspaper office at night; the narrator has met two loafers, Carnehan and Dravot, on a train and helped them once, and years later a broken man crawls into the office to tell him what happened when they made themselves kings of Kafiristan. The horror arrives in Carnehan's telling, with its repetitions and lapses, and in what he takes out of a bag at the end. The narrator's job is to be unable to do anything.
He writes the animal story as law. "Mowgli's Brothers" (1894) runs on the Law of the Jungle, quoted and obeyed; "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" (1894) is a war story with a mongoose and two cobras, told with the tactics laid out. The children's tales work because they take their own rules seriously, and Language & Craft, worth 20 points on Writory's scoresheet, is the category that rewards exactly this: sentences a child can follow and an adult cannot improve.
He cut. Kipling described in his memoir a method of laying a finished story aside and then striking out whatever could be struck, sometimes twice, so that the final text carried more than it said. "Lispeth" (1888) is under three pages and contains a whole colonial betrayal. "The Story of Muhammad Din" (1888) is shorter and buries a child in its last paragraph. The late stories, "Mrs. Bathurst" (1904) above all, are cut so far that readers still argue about what happened in them.
The signature move
The frame that cannot hold its story is the device to study in "The Man Who Would Be King". The narrator gets the tale in pieces because Carnehan's mind is in pieces; he loses the thread, corrects himself, asks the narrator to look at his hands and feet, which have been crucified. Kipling puts the reader in the narrator's chair with a wrecked man and a story too large for the room, and the horror is doubled by the setting: the office, the proof sheets, the ordinary night. The ending is the narrator seeing Carnehan again in the street, singing a hymn in the sun, and then hearing he died of sunstroke in the asylum. Nothing is explained, and the head in the bag has been shown once. The lesson is that a story told to someone is a story about the someone too.
Stories to read first
Seven stories, from India to the late work.
What to steal for your own stories
Exercises drawn from the stories.
What not to copy
The politics. Kipling's imperial certainties, his racial vocabulary and his contempt for Indian self-government are not incidental and cannot be edited out of many of the stories; a reader has to hold the craft and the ideology in view at once. Take the frame, the law and the cut; leave the empire.
Life at a glance
- 1865: Born in Bombay; sent to England at five and boarded with a family in Southsea he later called the House of Desolation
- 1882: Returns to India at sixteen as a journalist on the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore
- 1888: Plain Tales from the Hills, then six paperbacks including "The Man Who Would Be King" and "The Phantom Rickshaw"
- 1894: The Jungle Book
- 1902: Just So Stories
- 1907: Nobel Prize in Literature, the youngest winner to that date
- 1915: His son John is killed at Loos; the late stories grow darker and more compressed
- 1936: Dies in London
What writers can take from this
- Make the listener part of the story.
- Let a damaged narrator show damage through structure, not statement.
- Take your own invented rules seriously and state them.
- Cut a finished story twice, a week apart.
- Write for children as if for adults who happen to be young.
Try it yourself
Someone you once helped with a small favour turns up years later, changed, and tells you what happened to them. Write it in under 1,000 words as the listener. The teller loses the thread twice. You may see one object they have brought back, once, and never describe it again. End with what you hear of them afterwards.
Questions
What is Rudyard Kipling's best short story?
"The Man Who Would Be King" (1888) is the most admired of the Indian stories. Among the late work, "The Gardener" (1925) and "Mrs. Bathurst" (1904) are the ones critics return to.
How did Kipling influence the short story?
He made the frame narration and heavy cutting central tools of the English story and wrote the finest animal tales in the language. Borges, Hemingway and many later writers acknowledged learning from his compression.
Is Kipling hard to read?
The early Indian stories and the Jungle Book tales are clear and quick. The late stories are compressed to the point of difficulty and reward a second reading. The imperial politics need a reader's own judgement throughout.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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