Doyle left plenty of clues about how he thought a story should work. Most of them circle one idea. Keep the reader in the chair, and don't apologize for what it costs you to do it.
Effect Over Accuracy
Doyle's plainest writing rule was about attention. In the short story, he ranked the reader's grip above getting every detail correct, and he was candid that this cost him accuracy now and then. He looked at the trade and decided it was worth making. A reader who keeps turning pages, he reckoned, will forgive the odd slip that a pedant would circle in red.
In short stories it has always seemed to me that so long as you produce your dramatic effect, accuracy of detail matters little.
Arthur Conan Doyle, Memories and Adventures (1924)
This was not laziness dressed up as principle. He researched his historical novels obsessively, filling notebooks with period detail before he wrote a scene. For the short story, though, he made a deliberate call to serve the reader's experience ahead of the fact-checker's, and he owned the mistakes that followed rather than hiding them.
There's a quieter piece of advice buried in how he actually worked. Doyle believed in sheer output. He wrote to a daily quota, drafted at speed once his research was done, and produced across genres for decades, from detective fiction to historical adventure to spiritualist tracts. His example argues that a working writer earns momentum by writing, not by waiting for the perfect idea to announce itself. The Holmes stories exist because a bored young doctor kept putting words down in an empty room, and the rest of his enormous output followed the same rule.
The Trap of Your Own Success
His other lesson came from pain. Holmes made Doyle famous and then would not let him move on. He wanted to write historical fiction and be taken seriously for it, and instead the public kept demanding more of the detective. In 1893 he sent Holmes over the Reichenbach Falls in The Final Problem, killing him off to clear his desk for the work he cared about more.
The readers revolted. The pressure never really let up, and Doyle eventually brought Holmes back with The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1901 and a full resurrection soon after. The lesson underneath is a working writer's reality. The thing an audience loves is not always the thing you set out to make, and sometimes the audience gets the last word whether you like it or not.
For how these views grew out of his daily habits, see the full Arthur Conan Doyle writing routine.
What You Can Steal
- Serve attention first. A gripped reader forgives a lot. A bored one forgives nothing, however accurate you happened to be.
- Own your trade-offs. Doyle knew exactly where he cut corners and said so. Decide what you will sacrifice, then stop pretending you didn't.
- Research hard, then get out of the way. He prepped deeply and wrote lightly. Let the homework show up as quiet confidence, never as clutter.
- Respect what readers love. He resented Holmes and revived him anyway. Now and then the market has a point worth listening to.