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The Art of Incubation

“We do not know until the shell breaks what kind of egg we have been sitting on.” —T.S. Eliot

When we are not actively working toward a stated goal, we tend to call it procrastination. Often this is accurate. However, procrastination is sometimes confused with incubation, the process of ruminating and allowing ideas the time they need to take root.

Nobody looks at a six-months-pregnant woman and says, “Oh, she’s procrastinating. If she were a real achiever, she would have given birth to that baby already.” Nor do we expect that when we plant cucumber seeds in the garden soil that we’ll be harvesting cucumbers the following week. We all understand that birth and plant growth have their own time lines independent of our ideas and agendas.

Without incubation time, the natural cycles of life would not exist. So it is with writing. The challenge is that the writing life doesn’t have finite gestation periods defined by the seasons of planting and harvest. Each of us must determine for ourselves when it’s time to move from idea to incubation, and then to action.

I had the first reflection of my own incubation process at my first communications job at age twenty-five, where I was writing educational materials for behavioral health plan members. One day a team member who managed the database for our vast inventory of materials reported me to my boss when she noticed me looking out the window, “doing nothing.” In fact, I was struggling to come up with a way to say something meaningful to parents of teenage kids about navigating transition. But this inner inquiry was of course not visible to my colleague.

This is why incubation is tricky—it doesn’t look like much. A bird sits on an egg, a seed whispers its secrets beneath our hearing, a woman stares out the window.

Henri Poincaré, a legendary French mathematician and philosopher of science and polymath, proposed that creativity happens in four steps.

1. Preparation: We set our intentions and define our goals.
2. Incubation: We dream into the possibilities, honor the unknown, and become receptive to what is seeking us.
3. Illumination: We have the revelation in which some new possibility takes shape.
4. Execution: We create to manifest and materialize our discovery.

In the rush to cross the finish line, I see many writers leap straight to execution without having first grappled with what they are striving for, then entered the requisite realm of complete disorientation that the road to illumination seems to require of us.

Execution without vision is like a house without a foundation. When you incubate, you are waiting for the cement of your intent to dry before building the edifice.

What does incubation look like exactly, and how long does it take? This differs for each writer, and even for each project that writer undertakes. In chapter seventy, I share a story about a time when I simply could not force myself from incubation to illumination, despite my ambition. Some pieces of writing take a lifetime to complete, while others are written in a weekend. Your job as a writer is not to set a clock to tell you how to move through the stages of creativity, but to listen to and honor your own process. Dragging your heels or moving too fast can confuse your literary circadian rhythms and make it difficult to do your best work.

I believe that procrastination—which is born from fear—often happens between steps three and four of Poincaré’s process, in a kind of limbo between illumination and execution. Though you may recognize the direction your work is taking, you have a crisis of confidence that prevents you from taking the next necessary steps. This is a very different phenomenon from incubation, in which you have a goal or a vision and steep in the mysteries until a new possibility for creation coheres within.

The more closely you pay attention to your own process, the more easily you can identify what’s moving you ahead and what’s holding you back in your writing life. When you are willing to sit on the egg as long as necessary, then take action when the shell breaks, you are allowing the art of incubation to serve your writing.