The Art of Incubation

At Agile Writers we’ve been reading Sage Cohen’s book “Fierce on the Page.” Each week one of the writers will take the book home and read a chapter and digest it down to one page. Then, they return the next week and share what they learned and we talk about how it applies to our writing in general and what it means to us as Agile Writers.

• 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.”

• The challenge is that the writing life doesn’t have finite gestation.
• Henri Poincaré, mathematician & scientist proposed creativity happens in four steps.
  • Preparation: We set our intentions and define our goals.
  • Incubation: We dream into the possibilities, honor the unknown, and become receptive to what is seeking us.
  • Illumination: We have the revelation in which some new possibility takes shape.
  • Execution: We create to manifest and materialize our discovery.
• Many writers leap straight to execution without having first grappled with what they are striving for
• Execution without vision is like a house without a foundation.
• Procrastination— which is born from fear— often happens between steps three and four
  • You have a crisis of confidence that prevents you from taking the next necessary steps.
  • This is a very different from incubation, in which you have a goal or a vision

Greg’s Thoughts: At Agile Writers we do Preparation when we write our abstracts. We’re setting up our goals by writing down what we think our story is about. Incubation occurs during the synopsis. We extend into Illumination by creating a storyboard and massaging it until it is ready. Then, finally, we Execute – we write 10 pages a week until we’re done.