Every author starts out wishing for the same modest thing: a book that people actually read. You picture the kind reviews, the sales chart doing something other than impersonating a heart monitor at the exact moment of death, a stranger on a train holding your paperback and not visibly hating it. What nobody warns you about is the version of the wish where it comes true so hard it swallows you whole, and you spend the rest of your life chained to the one story you’d happily feed into a shredder.
Several of the most successful writers who ever lived ended up loathing the very book, or character, that made their name. Not quietly, either. One of them shoved his creation off a cliff. One begged a friend to set the lot on fire. The strange comfort here, if you write for a living, is realising the dream and the curse can be the same parcel.
Arthur Conan Doyle and the detective he pushed off a waterfall
Sherlock Holmes is possibly the most famous character in English fiction, and his own creator wanted him dead. By 1891 Doyle is writing to his mother that he means to “slay Holmes… and wind him up for good and all”, because the detective “takes my mind from better things”. The better things, in Doyle’s head, meant his historical novels, the ones nobody now reads on purpose.
His mother told him he mustn’t. He did it anyway. In 1893 he hurls Holmes and Professor Moriarty over the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland and tries to walk away whistling. The public reacted as though a real man had died: cancelled subscriptions, black armbands, the literary equivalent of a town meeting with torches. Doyle later summed up his feelings with a line only a Victorian could manage, comparing an overdose of Holmes to eating too much pâté de foie gras, “so that the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day”. An American publisher eventually waved enough money under his nose to resurrect the detective, which tells you everything about how principles survive contact with a decent cheque.
A.A. Milne and the bear with no trousers
Before a small bear with a honey habit colonised his life, A.A. Milne had a perfectly respectable career: eighteen plays for grown-ups, novels, screenplays, the lot. Then he wrote some stories for his son and accidentally built one of the best-loved characters on the planet. The thanks he felt for this verged on hostility.
Milne resented being filed forever under children’s author. He wrote that he wanted “to escape from” the genre the way he’d once escaped from his old job at Punch, and complained that a writer wants permanence, not just money. There is something quietly tragic in a man longing to be remembered as a serious playwright and instead spending eternity attached to a stuffed bear with no trousers and a worrying relationship with condensed milk. His illustrator, E.H. Shepard, came to feel the same way about his own Pooh drawings swallowing the rest of his work. Two men, one bear, no escape.
Agatha Christie and her “ego-centric little creep”
Agatha Christie invented Hercule Poirot, sold his stories by the lorryload, and privately could not stand the man. In 1960 she described her own most famous detective as “a detestable, bombastic, tiresome, ego-centric little creep”. You don’t write that about someone you’re fond of. You write that about a colleague who reheats fish pie in the office microwave.
Why keep going for decades, then? Duty, mostly. Christie felt she owed the public the thing it wanted, so she kept producing Poirot the way you keep paying a gym membership you stopped using in 2019: out of guilt, and a vague sense that cancelling would be admitting something. She vented through a recurring character, the novelist Ariadne Oliver, who moans endlessly about the foreign detective she’s saddled herself with. Therapy, of a sort, at a much better hourly rate.
Anthony Burgess and the “foul farrago”
Anthony Burgess wrote more than thirty books and wanted to be judged on almost any of them rather than the one you’ve heard of. A Clockwork Orange he dismissed as “a foul farrago” and “a very minor work”, and in some unpublished verse he flat-out told readers to go and read Shakespeare and Shelley instead, which is a bold marketing strategy for your own back catalogue.
His relationship with the book stayed gloriously inconsistent. He disowned it, then defended it, then gave another interview about it, then disowned it again, like a man repeatedly leaving a party and reappearing forty minutes later to retrieve his coat. Stanley Kubrick’s film cemented the whole thing in stone, and Burgess spent years grumbling that a brief, almost throwaway novel had elbowed his life’s work into the gutter. The lesson, as ever: the public chooses what you’ll be remembered for, and the public doesn’t give a toss about your feelings on the matter.
Peter Benchley, who spent his later years apologising to sharks
Peter Benchley wrote Jaws, watched it become a phenomenon, and then slowly realised he’d helped convince the planet that a shark could become a serial killer. By 1995 he admitted he “couldn’t write Jaws today”, because what we now know about sharks would make inventing such a villain impossible “in good conscience”. He’d learned there is no such thing as a rogue shark that develops a taste for human flesh, which is awkward when your bestseller hinges on precisely that.
So Benchley did the decent thing and pivoted into shark conservation, travelling the world with his wife Wendy to undo the panic his own book had stirred up. Imagine writing the most successful thriller of your generation, then devoting your retirement to telling everyone that the monster is actually quite shy and mostly wants to be left alone. Few authors earn a redemption arc. Fewer still spend it sticking up for the antagonist.
Franz Kafka, who wanted the whole lot burned
Franz Kafka took the strongest position of anyone on this list: he didn’t want his work to survive him at all. He destroyed a huge amount of his own writing while alive, then on his deathbed instructed his friend Max Brod to burn everything left, including the manuscripts we now treat as cornerstones of modern literature.
Brod ignored him completely. He published The Trial, The Castle, and the rest, which is why the word “Kafkaesque” exists and why every literature student knows the name. It poses an uncomfortable little question: if your dearest creative wish is oblivion, and your best mate overrules you and makes you immortal instead, has he betrayed you or saved you? Kafka, fittingly, never got to find out.
The cruel little joke underneath it all
Look across the six of them and the same shape keeps surfacing. Each one wished for success. Success turned up wearing one specific mask, then refused to ever take it off. Doyle wanted to be a great historical novelist; the world handed him a detective and a deerstalker. Milne wanted the theatre; he received a bear. The thing they reached for and the thing that trapped them arrived in the same envelope, and you cannot, it turns out, accept one without the other.
There is a warmth in it too, mind. Holmes, Poirot and Pooh have outlived every grudge their creators held, and they go on giving comfort to people those authors never met. Being remembered for one beloved thing instead of forgotten for many is, on reflection, not the worst deal a writer could strike. Most of us would sign for it in blood and consider it a bargain. As someone who has written more than twenty books and knows full well which couple of them readers mention first, I’d take the curse with both hands and say thank you.
If the idea of wishing for something and living with the version that actually arrives appeals to you, it happens to be the territory my own novels live in. The ’86 Fix follows Craig Pelling, a man handed a brief trip back to 1986 to fix his life, who discovers that mending one regret tends to break three things you weren’t looking at. And Terms May Apply is built entirely on this week’s moral: Kyle Hammond makes an idle birthday wish, it comes true, and then a gaunt little man named Edmund Wishkin turns up to explain that every wish carries a price, payable on collection. Ask Conan Doyle. The bill always comes.
For more from the bruising end of the writing life, you might also enjoy the famous authors who were rejected dozens of times before they made it, which is the same story told from the other side of the wish.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Arthur Conan Doyle hate Sherlock Holmes?
Doyle felt Holmes distracted him from the historical fiction he considered his real work, writing to his mother in 1891 that the detective “takes my mind from better things”. He killed Holmes off at the Reichenbach Falls in 1893, only to revive him years later after public outcry and a very generous offer from an American publisher.
Did A.A. Milne dislike Winnie-the-Pooh?
Milne resented being remembered solely as a children’s author. He had written numerous plays and novels for adults and felt Pooh overshadowed all of it, saying he wanted to “escape” the genre. His illustrator, E.H. Shepard, came to feel similarly trapped by his famous Pooh drawings.
What did Agatha Christie say about Hercule Poirot?
In 1960 Christie called her own creation “a detestable, bombastic, tiresome, ego-centric little creep”. She kept writing him anyway out of a sense of duty to readers, and channelled her frustration through a fictional novelist, Ariadne Oliver, who complains about her own detective.
Did Anthony Burgess regret writing A Clockwork Orange?
Burgess called it “a foul farrago” and “a very minor work”, and resented being remembered for it above his thirty-plus other books. He spent years alternately disowning and defending the novel, particularly after Stanley Kubrick’s film made it his defining work.
Why did Peter Benchley regret writing Jaws?
Benchley came to believe Jaws unfairly demonised sharks. He stated in 1995 that he “couldn’t write Jaws today” with what he had since learned about the animals, and spent his later years working in shark conservation alongside his wife Wendy to counter the fear his book had created.