Finding the Right Container: How a 10-Year Research Rabbit Hole Finally Took Flight by Todd Burleson

Every historical fiction writer knows the danger of the research rabbit hole. You go into the archives looking for a simple background detail to flesh out a scene, and you stumble across a footnote so staggering it derails your entire project.

For me, that footnote was a date: April 26, 1944.

I was working as an elementary school librarian, researching the Wright brothers, when I learned that on this day, Orville Wright stepped onto the tarmac at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, to take his final flight. He climbed aboard a Lockheed Constellation, a sleek, futuristic aircraft whose 123-foot wingspan was actually longer than the entire distance of his historic first flight at Kitty Hawk forty years earlier. During the 50-minute flight, Orville even took the controls, later joking, "I guess I ran the whole plane for a minute, but I let the machine take care of itself. I always said airplanes would fly themselves if you left them alone".

As a writer, my brain lit up. The poetic contrast between that fragile 1903 flyer and the massive 1944 wartime transport was irresistible. I was determined to tell this story.

My research journey hit a gold mine when I connected with George Hatcher Jr., the son of Colonel George Hatcher, the pilot who flew Orville that day. George Jr. generously shared his father's firsthand accounts, including articles, personal reflections, and even audio recordings from a local radio station. Having those primary sources, hearing the actual voices and reading the immediate reflections of the people in the cockpit, infused the history with an authenticity I could never have invented.

Armed with this incredible research, I sat down and wrote the story. Because of my background in the school library, I envisioned it as a 1,000-word picture book. I polished it, sent it out on submission, and waited.

It was rejected across the board.

For years, the manuscript sat dormant. I couldn't understand why a story with such incredible, primary-source-backed history wasn't landing.

It took a conversation with a brilliant publishing innovator to help me realize my mistake: the history was solid, but I had put it in the wrong container. That single historical moment was too heavy, too complex to be confined to a 1,000-word picture book. It didn't want to be the entire story; it wanted to be the symbolic anchor for something much larger.

I took the story down to the studs and rebuilt it a dozen times, but it now lives as a middle-grade historical fiction novel, The Secret War.

In the expanded canvas of a novel, Orville’s brief appearance on the tarmac took on a much deeper meaning. To my 12-year-old protagonists, the Lockheed Constellation represents the thrilling dawn of modern aviation, but it also casts the dark shadow of wartime progress. By 1944, the pure dream of flight born in a bicycle shop had evolved into terrifying machinery, while their own hometown of Dayton was secretly processing radioactive "spark plugs" for the atomic bomb. The history finally had room to breathe, perfectly encapsulated by a realization in the book: "The plane was the dream. The cloud was the cost".

It took me more than ten years to realize that a rejected manuscript doesn't always mean a bad idea. Sometimes, our meticulous historical research just needs a bigger canvas.

To my fellow writers: do you have a "failed" prototype or a rejected manuscript sitting in a drawer? If you look at the research you gathered for it, is it possible the story isn't dead, but just waiting for you to build a different container?

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The Secret War officially launches on April 1st. To learn more about the book, download the free Educator's Guide, or explore more of the history behind the story, please visit my website at toddburlesonwonders.com.