How I Turned a Short Story Into a Serialized Historical Novel
The Scene I Was Most Afraid to Write
Every writer has a scene they keep postponing.
Not because they do not know what happens in it. But because they are genuinely afraid to find out if they can pull it off. Afraid that when they finally sit down and try to write the thing that has been living in their head, it will come out smaller than the feeling that created it.
This is the story of that scene for me.
And of the story it eventually became.
It started on a completely ordinary evening.
I was not at my desk. I was not in a writing session. I was just somewhere in the middle of a regular day when something arrived without asking permission.
A British archaeologist. An ancient temple in India. A hidden passage beneath the God’s idol. And a man who steps through it and finds himself standing in 1010 AD, inside the same temple while it is still being built.
That was it. That was the whole spark.
But here is the thing about a spark like that. It does not wait for a convenient time. It does not respect your schedule or your energy levels or the fact that you have a full time job and a hundred other things asking for your attention. It just sits there, quietly insistent, until you do something about it.
I could not sleep properly that night. The image kept returning. The archaeologist in the dark. The passage beneath the stone. The impossible emergence into a world a thousand years removed from his own.
So I wrote it down. Not as a novel. Not as a plan. Just as a short story, the smallest possible container for the idea, because that was all I knew how to do with it at the time.
And something happened when I wrote it that I did not expect.
It felt alive in a way that my writing does not always feel. The scenes came quickly. The characters arrived with a clarity that surprised me. The world of 1010 AD felt less like something I was inventing and more like something I was remembering.
When I finished and shared it, the response told me something I already sensed but needed confirmed.
This story was not done with me.
The thing about turning a short story into a serialized novel is that the moment you decide to do it, everything that felt manageable suddenly feels enormous.
A short story can survive on atmosphere and a strong central idea. A novel cannot. A novel needs a world. It needs political reality and human conflict and characters who are complicated enough to sustain a reader’s attention across months, not pages.
And this particular world needed something else too.
It needed to be true.
Not invented. Not approximate. True in the way that only real history can make a story true, where the details are so specific and so strange that no writer could have made them up.
So I started researching.
I want to tell you what the research gave me because it is the part of this story that still makes me stop and feel something I do not entirely have words for.
The Brihadeeswarar Temple in India was completed around 1010 AD. It is built entirely from granite. There are no quarries anywhere nearby. The main tower stands over 60 metres tall and has stood almost perfectly intact through wars, colonial rule, floods, and a thousand years of a world that kept changing around it.
Engineers today still cannot fully explain how it was built.
But the research gave me something more important than the architecture.
It gave me the human beings inside the story.
The King Raja Raja Chola at 63 is not building the temple from a position of unchallenged power. The Chola empire in 1010 AD is financially stretched across military, naval, and temple expenditure simultaneously. He is building because he is mortal and he knows it. Because armies win land but monuments win time. Because he has already understood something his son has not yet understood about what it means to build something that outlasts you.
His son Prince Rajendran at 35 is not a villain. He is a rational man who has lived in war and watched the borders. He looks at the stone and sees unfinished consolidation, regrouping enemies, rising costs. He is not wrong. He is just thinking on a different timescale than his father.
Two intelligent men who love the same empire and disagree about how to protect it.
When I found that conflict inside the actual history, I stopped trying to manufacture drama for my story. The research had already given me something better than anything I could have invented.
And then there was the detail that became everything.
The King had the name of every single worker who built the temple inscribed on its walls. Not just the architects. Not just the priests. The masons. The carvers. The labourers who moved impossibly heavy stones across terrain that still confuses modern engineers.
A thousand year old king who believed that the people who did the work deserved to be remembered by name.
That detail quietly became the core of my entire story.
I will not say more than that here. But if you are reading Temple of Gods and you reach the final scene, you will understand why that inscription felt less like research and more like the story telling me where it needed to go.
So what was the scene I was most afraid to write?
It was the first one.
Not because I did not know what happened in it. I knew exactly what happened. Andrew Garrick hides inside the temple after hours. He finds the passage. He steps through. He emerges into 1010 AD.
The fear was different.
It was the fear that the scene would not carry the feeling that had kept me awake the night the idea arrived. That the image in my head was bigger than anything I could put on a page. That the moment I tried to write it, the magic would simply not be there.
Every writer who has ever had an idea they genuinely cared about knows this fear.
The gap between the story in your head and the story on the page is the most terrifying distance in the writing life. And the only way across it is to start writing and refuse to look down.
So I wrote the scene. And then I rewrote it. And then I put it away and came back to it and rewrote it again.
And eventually, not in the first draft or the second but somewhere in the middle of the process, it started to feel like what I had imagined.
Not exactly the same. Nothing ever is. But close enough to the feeling that I knew it was real.
That small seed of an idea on an ordinary evening is now growing into something I did not plan and could not have predicted.
A story that spans five parts and months of 1010 AD. A British archaeologist who arrives as an outsider and leaves as something harder to name. A king who thinks in centuries. An heir who thinks in wars. An architect whose loyalty is to Shiva and sacred geometry. A spy who grows to respect the very man he was asked to watch.
And somewhere at the end of it all, a name inscribed on an ancient wall.
I did not know any of that on the night the idea arrived.
I just knew I had to write it down before it disappeared.
One question for you
Have you ever had an idea arrive uninvited and refuse to leave until you did something about it?
What did you do with it?
Share it in the comments. And if you are curious about where Andrew Garrick’s journey is taking him, Temple of Gods is running every Friday. Part II begins this week.