Heed Your Daemon: Rudyard Kipling on Writing
By Maria Popova
It is worth remembering that anything worth doing, anything bound to earn its keep in the house of tomorrow, takes a long time, takes riding the troughs of doubt with unassailable devotion, takes balancing a clarity of vision with the courage of uncertainty. This is true of art and true of love and true of every creative endeavor in the great work of composing a life.
Rudyard Kipling (December 30, 1865–January 28, 1936) was the age I am now when he became the youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize, awarded him for his “power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration.” The wild, wondrous worlds he created enchanted generations of children and influenced generations of writers. They are why Jane Goodall became Jane Goodall.
In the final year of his sixties, not knowing he would not live another — how cruel and how merciful that only hindsight knows each last — Kipling began setting down all he knew about writing, lensed through the story of his unusual life. He worked on the manuscript tirelessly until just before his seventieth birthday. Days later, he suffered a hemorrhage from which he never recovered. His wife edited the unfinished manuscript and published it as Something of Myself: For My Friends Known and Unknown (public domain).

Considering the Socratic notion of a personal daemon that Aristotle popularized — an “unknown superfactor” of divine origin that steers you toward right action by mercilessly flagging wrong choices — Kipling looks back on the first visitation of his daemon as a young, unsure writer who “sat bewildered” among possible paths to take until the daemon whispered, “Take this and no other.” (Dostoyevsky must have heeded a similar voice when he so boldly wrote to the general of his military unit, pleading to be released from duty in order to become a writer: “I am convinced that only on that path could I truly be useful.”)
Kipling stumbled down the path, looking back on his early writing as “weak, bad, and out of key.” But over and over his daemon goaded him to give things the time they take, often leading him back after a long lapse to ideas he had given up on. “Again and again it went dead under my hand,” Kipling recalls of one such abandoned story, “and for the life of me I could not see why.” But returning with a new perspective, which life always gives us by the mere accumulation of living, he would reanimate these dead ideas into some of his most beloved stories — a reminder that waiting is not a passive state but a creative act that allows time to anneal the essence of things and find the right shape of a devotion, be it to a person or to a project.
He recounts:
My Daemon was with me in the Jungle Books, Kim, and both Puck books, and good care I took to walk delicately, lest he should withdraw. I know that he did not, because when those books were finished they said so themselves with, almost, the water-hammer click of a tap turned off.
But beneath this mystical conception of the writing process pulsates Kipling’s uncompromising pragmatism about the mechanics of the craft, one of the hardest aspects of which is knowing when something is finished — feeling the tap turn off. He shares his exacting strategy for arriving at that point and trusting it:
In an auspicious hour, read your final draft and consider faithfully every paragraph, sentence and word, blacking out where requisite. Let it lie by to drain as long as possible. At the end of that time, re-read and you should find that it will bear a second shortening. Finally, read it aloud alone and at leisure. Maybe a shade more brushwork will then indicate or impose itself. If not, praise Allah and let it go, and “when thou hast done, repent not.”
Kipling’s relationship with his daemon contains a wonderful antidote to what may be the greatest danger of success for any artist — becoming a template of yourself — entirely countercultural in our era of sequels and uninspired variations on a marketable theme:
One of the clauses in our contract was that I should never follow up “a success,” for by this sin fell Napoleon and a few others.
Kipling distills the central tenet of allowing your daemon to serve you:
When your Daemon is in charge, do not try to think consciously. Drift, wait, and obey.
Complement with Gabriel García Márquez on his unlikely beginnings as a writer and James Baldwin’s fierce advice on writing, then dive into this decades-deep archive of great writers sharing their wisdom on the craft.
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