"I really want to write, but my day job takes up all my time."
I used that excuse for years. Then I read about a nineteenth-century doctor, and it stung. That doctor was Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes.
Before becoming a full-time author, Doyle spent eight years as a general practitioner, writing fiction steadily on the side. He turned out 50 to 60 short stories in that time. The key wasn't waiting for free time. It was treating those part-time years not as preparation but as real production time—a side-job production strategy.
The Consulting Room That Became a Writing Studio
Doyle ran a medical practice in Southsea, a seaside town in England, from 1882 to 1890.
Patients were scarce at first, which left him with long stretches of quiet hours.
He used every one of those empty hours to write.
In an 1892 interview with The Strand Magazine, Doyle looked back on those years. "By degrees literature took my attention from the preparation of prescriptions," he recalled. His consulting room had essentially become a writing studio.
Over those eight years, he published some 50 to 60 short stories in a range of magazines.
He also wrote the first two Sherlock Holmes novels during this period: A Study in Scarlet (1887) and The Sign of Four (1890).
His First Step Came Much Earlier
Doyle earned his first paycheck as a writer while still a medical student.
In 1879, at age 20, he sold a short story, "The Mystery of Sasassa Valley," to Chambers's Journal for three guineas.
Three guineas was no fortune, but it changed how he saw the world. He later said the check made him feel like "a beast that has once tasted blood." It was his first real taste of validation.
While still at medical school, he even signed on as a ship's surgeon aboard an Arctic whaling ship, putting off his exams for a year. He was gathering material for his writing simply by living his life.
The Careful Calculation Behind a "Dramatic" Decision
In 1891, after opening an eye practice in London, Doyle came down with influenza during the Russian flu pandemic.
As he recovered, he made what became a famous declaration, recorded in his autobiography: "I determined with a wild rush of joy to cut the painter and to trust for ever to my power of writing."
Yet Doyle had already signed with A.P. Watt—widely considered the world's first literary agent—a year earlier, in 1890.
Commissions from The Strand Magazine were already coming in. By the time he took the leap, he had built a solid safety net.
In the interview, he put it more matter-of-factly: "Orders for stories began to come in, and at the expiration of three months I forsook medicine altogether." It wasn't an impulsive gamble but a calculated transition.
Did He Really Write While Waiting for Patients?
There's a famous story that Doyle wrote in his consulting room only because not a single patient ever came through the door.
Doyle himself told this version in his autobiography, written decades later.
However, scholars have pointed out that it doesn't match his 1892 interview, in which he mentioned seeing patients in the morning and spending his afternoons at the eye hospital. The "no patients at all" story is probably a romanticized memory shaped years afterward.
Oddly, that came as a relief. You don't have to take the legend at face value. What matters is that he wrote steadily, day after day, whatever the myth says.
Side-Job Years Aren't Preparation—They're Production
Doyle's story offers one clear takeaway for anyone juggling writing and a job.
Your side-job years aren't a waiting room for your future career.
They're the main event, where you build up your body of work.
He didn't quit medicine to become a writer. He became a writer while still practicing medicine. He built up 50 to 60 stories, signed with an agent, and developed relationships with magazines before cutting the cord.
Don't wait for your passion to peak before you act. Focus on building a body of work alongside your job, and on lining up places to publish it.
You may really lack long stretches of free time. But claiming you have no spare pockets of time at all may not be true.