Arthur Conan Doyle's Writing Routine

Q: When did Arthur Conan Doyle write Sherlock Holmes?

Conan Doyle wrote A Study in Scarlet, the first Sherlock Holmes story, in the afternoons and evenings while running a slow medical practice at 1 Bush Villas, Southsea, in 1886. He completed it in roughly six weeks. Patient hours were sparse enough that the waiting room doubled as an unplanned writing studio.

Q: How did Arthur Conan Doyle manage writing and medicine at the same time?

Conan Doyle used the gaps in his medical day (time between patients, slow afternoons, evenings after the practice closed) to write fiction. He kept a notebook at hand and treated writing as what happened when medicine didn't. His first years in Southsea earned him only £154 in 1882, which left a great deal of empty hours.

Q: Why did Arthur Conan Doyle kill off Sherlock Holmes?

He killed Holmes in 'The Final Problem' (1893) because he felt the detective stories were crowding out the writing he cared about more: historical fiction, science fiction, and eventually his work on spiritualism. He later wrote that it was 'justifiable homicide in self-defence, since, if I had not killed him, he would certainly have killed me.'

The Consulting Room as Writing Studio

Conan Doyle arrived in Southsea in 1882 with the intention of building a medical practice from scratch. The practice built itself slowly. His income from medicine in that first year was £154, and it rose to £250 the second year, then crept toward £300 where it stayed for most of his eight years there. Victorian general practice in a middling suburb was not a high-volume enterprise. Patients came when they needed you and stayed away when they didn't, which meant large portions of the working day sat empty between appointments.

This is the context that produced Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle had notebooks out on the desk in his consulting room, and he wrote fiction during the gaps. He'd been trying to sell stories since university, with modest and inconsistent results. The Southsea years gave him something previous years hadn't: a reliable block of unstructured time that arrived daily, whether or not he had anything to do with it. The waiting room enforced the habit. He wrote because the alternative was sitting there.

In 1886, four years into the practice, he started work on A Study in Scarlet. He completed it in about six weeks, a pace that reflects both his natural fluency and the fact that he had long afternoon stretches with no other claim on them. The manuscript was rejected by several publishers before appearing in Beeton's Christmas Annual in 1887. The payment was £25 for all rights. Conan Doyle took it, because £25 from writing was better than nothing, and went back to the consulting room, back to the notebook, back to the waiting.

There's a version of this story that frames the slow medical practice as a misfortune Conan Doyle overcame. I think that's backward. The slow practice was the writing routine. The friction and the boredom and the hours between patients were the conditions under which the work happened. If his practice had been busy and lucrative, there's no particular reason to think the Holmes stories would have been written at all, at least not in that decade, in that form, with that speed. The gaps made the writing. Most writers are waiting for fewer gaps. Conan Doyle had gaps he couldn't avoid and he filled them with the work that defined the rest of his life.

How He Actually Built the Stories

Conan Doyle's method of constructing a Holmes story was almost the inverse of how most writers approach plot. He worked backward. Before writing a single scene, he decided how the crime was committed and by whom. Then he built the evidence trail, the clues scattered through the narrative that Holmes would read and the reader would miss. Only after that structure was fixed did he write forward, letting Holmes move through the story toward a conclusion Conan Doyle had already reached.

This technique came directly from his medical training. At Edinburgh Medical School in the 1870s, his professor Dr. Joseph Bell was famous for reading patients' histories from observation alone before they'd spoken a word. Bell would clock a man's trade from the calluses on his hands, his military service from his posture, his recent travel from the mud on his boots. The students found it uncanny. Conan Doyle found it useful. He took Bell's diagnostic method and turned it into a narrative engine: Holmes observes, deduces, arrives at a conclusion the audience can verify against the facts of the case.

What this meant for the writing routine is that Conan Doyle rarely got stuck in the way writers who draft without knowing the ending often do. He had already solved the problem before he started the prose. The actual writing was the pleasurable part, the dramatization of a sequence he'd already worked out. He wrote fast because the hard thinking had happened before the pen touched paper. For The Strand Magazine, he produced a complete Holmes short story every month across multiple series in the early 1890s, a pace that his editors depended on and that became one of the founding rhythms of popular magazine publishing in Britain.

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

The Writer Who Tried to Quit His Own Creation

By 1891, Conan Doyle had abandoned medicine. He'd moved to London intending to practice as an eye specialist, but patients didn't come, and the consulting room hours felt too familiar. He gave up on the ophthalmology plan and committed to writing full time. The Strand had begun publishing Holmes short stories that year, starting with "A Scandal in Bohemia" in July 1891, and the response from readers was immediate. Six stories turned into twelve, then another twelve. Conan Doyle was earning more from Holmes than he'd ever earned from anything, and he hated it.

His letters from this period are remarkably candid about the problem. He wrote to his mother in 1891 that he was thinking about slaying Holmes, that the character was taking up the space in his career where more serious work ought to go. By "serious work" he meant the historical novels he'd been publishing alongside Holmes: The White Company (1891), his medieval adventure story, was the book he thought would last. He was wrong about that, and he probably sensed he might be wrong even then, which made the resentment sharper.

He killed Holmes in "The Final Problem," published in December 1893, sending the detective over the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland locked in combat with Professor Moriarty. The public reaction was extraordinary. Thousands of readers cancelled their Strand subscriptions. People wore black armbands in the street. Conan Doyle later described the decision with characteristic dry humor, writing that it had been "justifiable homicide in self-defence, since, if I had not killed him, he would certainly have killed me." The line is funny and also exact. He genuinely believed Holmes was consuming the writing life he wanted.

What followed is worth noting for any writer who has ever felt pinned to a successful project they'd rather leave behind. Conan Doyle spent the next eight years working on exactly the books he wanted to write, the historical fiction, the journalism, the science fiction of The Lost World. Then, in 1901, he published The Hound of the Baskervilles in The Strand, set before Holmes's death so technically not a resurrection. Reader appetite was enormous. Two years after that, he brought Holmes fully back to life in "The Adventure of the Empty House" (1903). The detective's return sold better than anything he'd published in the intervening decade. The trap closed again, and this time it stayed closed.

After Holmes: Spiritualism and the Second Life

Conan Doyle's post-Holmes career is usually treated as a footnote, or worse, as an embarrassment: the brilliant rationalist who created the world's most famous logical thinker and then spent his last years believing in fairies and communicating with the dead. The story of the Cottingley fairy photographs, where two young girls fooled Conan Doyle with cut-out figures from a children's book, tends to get deployed as evidence of a decline. That reading misses what was actually happening.

His son Kingsley died in 1918 from pneumonia, complications from wounds sustained on the Western Front. His brother Innes died the following year. The losses were stacked on top of decades of watching what industrialized war could do to a generation. Conan Doyle turned to spiritualism the way a grieving man turns toward anything that offers the possibility of contact with the dead. His commitment was total and sincere. He lectured worldwide on the subject, funded research, wrote extensively, and said directly that he would sacrifice his entire literary reputation if it meant convincing people that communication with the dead was real.

What this second career shares with the first is the same quality of full commitment. He wrote about spiritualism with the same industriousness he'd brought to the Holmes stories. He lectured on it with the same confidence he'd brought to his medical diagnoses. Whether or not the conclusions were right, the method was consistent: gather evidence, reason from it, publish the findings. The tragedy is that the evidence was wrong. But the mind working through it was the same one that had given Holmes his famous line about the impossible and the improbable, and in a different domain, with different materials, it arrived at different conclusions. That's not embarrassing. It's human.

Arthur Conan Doyle's Writing Routine: The Full Picture

The Arthur Conan Doyle writing routine has no single famous anecdote attached to it, no kitchen table at four in the morning, no standing desk or mandatory word count. What it has is a more useful structure for most working writers: time that existed because other things weren't happening, turned consistently toward the work. The Southsea consulting room produced Holmes because Conan Doyle was there, the notebook was there, and the patients often weren't.

When he moved to full-time writing in 1891, the routine formalized without becoming rigid. He wrote in the mornings, handled correspondence and business in the afternoons, and kept a clear separation between the drafting hours and everything else. At Undershaw, the house he built in Hindhead, Surrey in 1897, he had a proper study for the first time. The study helped, but by then the habit was already built. He'd spent nine years writing in whatever room was available, and the discipline didn't depend on the room.

The pace he sustained across the Holmes stories is worth taking seriously. In the peak Strand years of the early 1890s, he was producing complete, tightly plotted short stories at a rate of roughly one per month while also working on longer projects. He could do this because he never sat down to write a story he hadn't already solved. The planning happened separately from the drafting, which meant the drafting could go quickly. Writers who agonize at the sentence level while simultaneously trying to figure out what happens next are doing two jobs at once. Conan Doyle had the discipline to separate them, and the output reflects it.

Sources

The essential primary source is Conan Doyle's own autobiography, Memories and Adventures (1924), available via Project Gutenberg, where he discusses the Southsea years, the genesis of Holmes, his relationship with the character, and his turn toward spiritualism. Andrew Lycett's biography Conan Doyle: The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes (2007) is the fullest modern account of the writing life and medical years. Daniel Stashower's Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle (1999) covers the same ground with particular attention to the Holmes stories and their composition. The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia holds a detailed wiki entry on his medical career and the Southsea practice. For the Strand relationship specifically, the Victorian Web's entry on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Literary Career provides useful context on the magazine publishing context of the 1890s. See also: Arthur Conan Doyle on Wikipedia.

What You Can Steal

Conan Doyle's routine is particularly useful for writers who have day jobs, irregular hours, or any situation where writing time arrives in unpredictable chunks. Here's what actually translates:

Use the gaps, not the ideal conditions. The Southsea consulting room was never meant to be a writing studio. Conan Doyle wrote there because he had time and a notebook and nowhere else to be. Your commute, your lunch hour, your slow Tuesday afternoon: those are the gaps. Fill them.
Solve the problem before you write the scene. Conan Doyle knew the ending of every Holmes story before he wrote the opening. When you sit down to draft, the planning work should already be done. Separate thinking from writing and both go faster.
Write backward from what you know is true. Holmes eliminates the impossible and works with what remains. In your own drafts, start from the conclusion you're certain of, whether it's the ending, the theme, or the character's core wound, and build the path to it rather than searching for the destination while moving.
Let the routine outlast the room. Conan Doyle built his writing habit in one room and carried it into every subsequent room across forty years. The habit is more portable than any dedicated writing space. Build it somewhere inconvenient, and it'll survive anywhere.
Know what you actually want to write, and protect it. Conan Doyle's struggle with Holmes wasn't vanity. He had specific books he cared about more, and he spent decades trying to give them space. If there's a project that matters to you outside the work that pays, it deserves its own protected hours. Otherwise the Holmes in your life will crowd it out too.

Frequently Asked Questions

When did Arthur Conan Doyle write Sherlock Holmes?

He wrote A Study in Scarlet, the first Holmes story, in 1886 while running a slow medical practice in Southsea. Patient hours were sparse enough that the consulting room became an unplanned writing studio. He completed the manuscript in roughly six weeks. It appeared in Beeton's Christmas Annual in 1887, for a one-time payment of £25.

How did Arthur Conan Doyle manage writing and medicine at the same time?

He used the gaps in his medical day, time between patients, slow afternoons, evenings after the practice closed. His first year in Southsea earned him only £154 from medicine, which meant a lot of empty hours. Writing filled them. He kept a notebook at hand and treated the fiction as what happened when the doctoring didn't.

Why did Arthur Conan Doyle kill off Sherlock Holmes?

He killed Holmes in "The Final Problem" (1893) because he felt the detective stories were crowding out the writing he cared about more: historical fiction and, later, his work on spiritualism. He later wrote that it had been "justifiable homicide in self-defence, since, if I had not killed him, he would certainly have killed me." Reader outcry was intense. He brought Holmes back in 1901 with The Hound of the Baskervilles and fully resurrected him in "The Adventure of the Empty House" in 1903.

Who inspired the character of Sherlock Holmes?

Dr. Joseph Bell, Conan Doyle's professor at Edinburgh Medical School, was the primary model. Bell was famous for reading patients' occupations, recent travels, and personal histories from physical observation alone, before they'd said a word. Conan Doyle acknowledged this directly in his autobiography Memories and Adventures (1924). He took Bell's diagnostic method and turned it into the engine of every Holmes story.

The Routine at a Glance