Incubation: A Neglected Aspect of the Composing Process?

S. Krashen
ESL Journal 4(2): 10-11.
2001

Remember when you were staring at the ceiling in elementary school, and the teacher asked you whether the answer was on the ceiling? Maybe it was.

"Composition is not enhanced by grim determination." (Frank Smith, Writing and the Writer).

In a discussion of possible therapies to remediate writing apprehension, Daly (1985) includes these suggestions:

"One potentially appropriate therapy for procrastination lies in teaching something akin to time management.The writer learns to go to a specific location each day at a certain time and do nothing but write: No distractions are permitted ... What may be appropriate for (blocked writers) is ‘forced’ writing, where something must be put down on paper whether it is meaningful or not (e.g. writing whatever comes to mind, free-flowing brainstorming)." (p. 71).

In other words, procrastinators need to have a set time when they do nothing but write, and blocked writers need to do forced writing.

There is a problem with these recommendations. It denies what I think is one of the most important parts of the composing process: incubation, a term introduced by Wallas (1926) for the process by which the mind goes about solving a problem, subconsciously and automatically. Elbow (1972, 1981) refers to incubation as "cooking."

Incubation seems to happen best when we take a break from creative work. During this time, we need to do something completely different, something that does not involve conscious and deliberate problem-solving. Wallas suggests that "in the case of the more difficult forms of creative thought ... it is desirable that not only that there should be an interval free from conscious thought on the particular problem concerned, but also that that interval should be so spent that nothing should interfere with the free working of the unconscious or partially unconscious processes of the mind. In those cases, the stage of incubation should include a large amount of actual mental relaxation" (p. 95).

Examples of incubation

Wallas (1926) reports that he first heard of the idea of incubation from the physicist Helmholz. In a speech delivered in 1891, Helmholz described how new thoughts came to him: After previous investigation, "in all directions," .. " happy ideas come unexpectedly without effort, like an inspiration ... they have never come to me when my mind was fatigued, or when I was at my working table ... They came particularly readily during the slow ascent of wooded hills on a sunny day" (p. 91).