His routine started as a survival tactic. A young doctor with an empty waiting room turned the silence into pages, and the habit stayed with him long after the patients finally arrived.
Writing in the Gaps Between Patients
In June 1882 Doyle stepped off the boat at Portsmouth with less than £10 to his name and opened a practice at 1 Bush Villas in Elm Grove, Southsea. The patients did not come. For a new doctor that was a slow disaster, and he spent long stretches sitting in a consulting room with nothing to consult on. So he wrote. The same empty afternoons that threatened his medical career quietly built his literary one, and by the time the practice found its feet he already had a second profession running in parallel.
The discipline is the part worth copying. Doyle did not wait to feel inspired. Several accounts describe him holding to a daily word target, a figure often reported at around 3,000 words. Whether that number was exact or a tidy round estimate, the habit behind it was real. He showed up, put down his count, and did it again the next day, patients or no patients. He treated writing as work he clocked into rather than a mood he waited on.
The pattern repeated itself in 1891, and the repeat is telling. Doyle went to Vienna to study ophthalmology, came back to London, and hung out a shingle as an eye specialist near Harley Street. Once again the patients stayed away. He later joked that not a single one crossed his threshold, which left him free hours in a quiet consulting room. He used them exactly as he had in Southsea, filling the empty appointments with Holmes short stories for The Strand. Within months he abandoned medicine for good and wrote full time.
Method Before Momentum
Speed on the page came from preparation off it. Before starting a historical novel especially, Doyle read deeply into the period and copied everything useful into notebooks, cross-indexed so he could reach for the right detail in the middle of a scene without breaking stride.
My system before writing such a book as 'Sir Nigel' or 'The Refugees' was to read everything I could get about the age and to copy out into notebooks all that seemed distinctive.
Arthur Conan Doyle, How I Write My Books, The Strand Magazine (1924)
With the groundwork laid, he could move at a startling pace. He once claimed to have written ten thousand words of The Refugees inside a single twenty-four-hour stretch, the sort of burst that only becomes possible when the research is already sitting in front of you. By 1891 the writing had overtaken the medicine entirely. Doyle gave up the profession, yet the shape of the working day he had drilled in Southsea stayed with him. Steady output, not a wait for the muse, is how one man produced Holmes, a shelf of historical fiction, and reams of nonfiction across a single career.
The Southsea years set the pattern for everything after. Read more in the full Arthur Conan Doyle writing routine.
What You Can Steal
- Set a number and clock in. Doyle's quota did the deciding for him. A daily target kills the daily argument about whether to write at all.
- Mine your dead time. His whole first act happened in the hours a job left empty. Guard those pockets and fill them with words.
- Prep so you can sprint. The notebooks are why the fast days were possible. Front-load the research and the sentences come easier.
- Judge the week, not the hour. Some days he crawled, one day he hit ten thousand words. Consistency averages out the bad sessions.