Every single writer knows the feeling: you’re minding your own business, living your regular human life, when a story taps you on the shoulder. Then it pokes you. Then it sets up camp, takes your favorite blanket, drinks all your jasmine tea, and kindly informs you that it will not be leaving anytime soon.
Some stories whisper. Once did not. Once barged in like it owned the place.
And honestly, that feels appropriate when you’re writing about the man who may have been the real King Arthur.
And strangely, it all started in a Harvard Extension School classroom.
The Night I Met the Real King Arthur
The night class I took at Harvard’s extension school was on the historical King Arthur, which initially sounded like a contradiction, honestly. I thought the class would be interesting in a harmless, scholarly way. Like, “Here’s a myth you thought you knew, but here’s the academic version.” I wasn’t expecting it to set my imagination sprinting across centuries like it had been shot out of a very enthusiastic and utterly disruptive cannon.
Most people think Arthur is a myth, and in a way, they’re right. Because most people imagine Arthur through the lens of later writers. The King Arthur they imagine, the one galloping around in polished armor with flawless morals and perfect hair, is the creation of French authors writing hundreds of years after the real man lived.
And who can blame them? Chrétien de Troyes gave us Lancelot and the courtly love narratives we now treat as canon. Malory polished everything into his sprawling Le Morte d’Arthur, packed with honor codes, quests, and tragedy. They built a version of Arthur that stuck so well, we forget it was constructed centuries after the supposed real man lived.
But the 400s? That was a different world entirely.
Britain in the 5th century was raw, fragmented, and unstable. The Roman legions were gone, leaving a fractured landscape of warlords, chieftains, and tribal territories vying for power. Roads were falling apart. Cities were shrinking. Trade routes were thinning. Literacy was rare. Armor was not shining steel; it was whatever you could forge, steal, or keep intact through repeated combat. Politics was less courtly intrigue and more try not to die on the way back to your hill fort.
Into this chaos stepped Arthur: a military leader rallying local forces against invaders, possibly tied to the Battle of Badon Hill if you follow the breadcrumbs of half legends and scattered historical hints.
So, when my professor said, “The historical Arthur probably wasn’t a king at all, but a warlord,” my mind lit up in the way dangerous ideas do.
The real Arthur wasn’t a polished king; he was a war leader in a collapsing world.
He wasn’t a symbol of perfection; he was a man trying to survive the darkness of his time.
Do not tell a writer that the world’s most famous mythic king was actually a grim, morally dubious war leader unless you want them to think, Well, I need to write about that guy immediately.
Wading Into the Mud of the 400s
The more I learned about the period, the more fascinated I became. The 400s weren’t glamorous. They were lean, hungry years. Britain was fractured into splinter kingdoms and tribal territories. Power was constantly shifting. Survival depended on alliances, military skill, and sometimes, sheer luck.
There were no gleaming medieval castles, printed books, or romantic affairs happening in elegantly draped rooms. If Guinevere existed — and I believe did — she wouldn’t have been sweeping through court in silk. She would have been navigating a landscape that demanded resilience and intelligence just to stay alive.
And the warriors then? Let’s just say the closest equivalent to a knight was a mounted soldier loyal to a chieftain or king. And even then, imagine less polished hero and more dangerous man who knows how to swing a sword because it’s Tuesday.
This grounding thrilled me. It stripped the story to its bones and asked, Who were these people really? Who were they before the fantasy inflated them into symbols?
I wanted to find out. And then I wanted to show it.
But before I could write a retelling, I had to untangle centuries of storytelling.
Chrétien de Troyes, writing in the 1100s, shaped much of the Arthurian world we think we know. He gave us Lancelot as the noble, impossibly devoted knight. He gave us the romantic scaffolding that pops up in every modern retelling. Without Chrétien, Lancelot and Guinevere’s entire tragic dynamic would not exist.
Then, a few centuries later, Malory arrived with Le Morte d’Arthur, a sprawling, beautifully dramatic tapestry that gathered countless older stories and shaped them into the version most know. Malory added gravity, destiny. He added that sense of a kingdom built on ideals too perfect to last.
All of it gorgeous. All of it powerful. But none of it the historical reality.
My brain couldn’t leave that gap alone.
What if we walked backward?
What if we peeled the stories apart and traced the roots to the muddy, desperate 400s?
What if we met Lancelot and Guinevere before the French romance writers turned them into symbols of doomed perfection?
And that’s where Once was born.
I wanted Arthur ruthless and flawed. I wanted Lancelot dangerous without the polished knightliness. I wanted Guinevere brilliant, political, strategic. I wanted Merlin a little unhinged, because honestly, if you lived in the 400s and saw the future, you’d probably be cranky, too.
I didn’t want etiquette; I wanted grit. I wanted the raw world that might have breathed life into the earliest version of the myth.
We tend to think of legends as polished and shiny. We set them on pedestals, making them unchangeable to the point of being divine. But the truth is, even the original stories were rough around the edges. And once I glimpsed the real Arthur beneath the romantic varnish, I couldn’t stop wondering how far down the roots went.
What happens when you peel back the elegance and get to the bones? What happens when you ask who these people were before we turned them into caricatures of themselves?
The version of Arthur that grabbed me was brutal. Morally questionable. Definitely not someone you’d want to share a goblet of wine with unless you were prepared to dodge a knife or two–which, for a storyteller, is perfect.
So I followed him into the mud of the 400s. Then I dragged his compatriots with him.
Lancelot. Guinevere. Nimue. Merlin, who I immediately made grumpy and jealous because someone in this cast needed to complain about everything, and the druid seemed highly qualified.
The deeper I went, the more the story tugged me along like it had a secret to confess. Grit allows truth to surface. And truth, even fictional truth, has a way of refusing to leave you alone.
Sure, a gritty retelling of Arthur is interesting. A gritty retelling with emotionally disastrous love triangles is even more interesting. But my brain was not content to stay in one century. It took its pointy index finger and poked me in the chest again.
What if Lancelot and Guinevere were bound across time? What if they were doomed to be reborn again and again, caught in a cycle they never asked for? What if history kept leaving breadcrumbs for them, whether they wanted to follow or not?
To love someone across centuries is romantic. To be destined to repeat the same tragedy? That’s something else entirely. Something that asks real questions about fate, identity, and choice.
Time became a character. History became a stage set that rearranged itself behind them. And every version of Lancelot and Guinevere had to reckon with the weight of their earlier selves, whether they remembered those lives or not.
Writing reincarnation required a new kind of emotional lens. Because what does it actually feel like to be reborn? Does something linger? Does love carry forward, or does it shapeshift? Does grief follow you like a shadow across centuries? Does fate feel comforting, or does it feel like a trap?
What would it feel like to be haunted by a love you never chose? To sense a stranger and feel like you’ve known them before? To live with the unshakable suspicion that you’ve been here already, made this mistake already, loved this person already… and you’ll do it again?
Every lifetime in Once reflects a different answer.
Sometimes they recognize each other immediately. Sometimes they fall apart all over again. Sometimes the universe gives them a sliver of hope just to see what they’ll do with it.
And each version of Lancelot and Guinevere carried a different tone. Some lives were tender. Some were vicious, some weary, some hopeful. But all of them were shaped by forces older and darker than the writers who romanticized them.
Because some stories don’t belong to one period. They belong to the whole human experience.
I layered the timelines around real historical moments that echoed the chaos of Arthur’s original world — eras of change, conflict, or cultural fracture. Because myth thrives where history cracks open. Why? Because these characters aren’t ordinary. Their lives needed to intersect with eras where the stakes were high, where belief systems cracked open, where legend could slip into the cracks of reality unnoticed.
And every time they found each other in these different periods, it felt like history was taking a deep breath, waiting to see what they’d do this time.
People assume a story that won’t leave you alone is “inspiring” or “romantic,” but honestly? Sometimes it’s relentless. Sometimes it wakes you at three in the morning. Sometimes it nudges you while you’re trying to buy broccoli at the grocery store.
But it’s also a gift.
The ones that tether themselves to you? Those are the rare ones. The ones with teeth.
Once wanted to be more than a retelling. It wanted to be a reclamation, a grounding of myth in truth. A reminder that legends start with people before they become symbols, and that sometimes the oldest stories ask the most modern questions.
This story didn’t follow me. It led me. Across centuries. Across versions of itself. Across the muddy fields of the real Arthurian world and the gleaming illusions built centuries later.
It demanded grit. It whispered for magic. It begged for reincarnation. And it asked me to hold all of it at once.
Once held on because it needed to be written with both hands. With truth and grit. With magic and history. With heartbreak and hope. With characters who refuse to fade, no matter how many centuries you throw them through.
This story didn’t just want to be told. It wanted to live.
And honestly? I’m glad it chose me to carry it.