“In studying anything work with the head, get all you can out of it. Then put it away for a month and when you come back to it you will find much that you never dreamed of before.“ – Hans von Bulow, Letters (see Ruth Sawyer, The Way of the Storyteller,p. 122)

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Incubation. The mythographer Joseph Campbell quips that nothing compares with what we did during those first nine months in the womb. Over the years, you may have been successful in science or business, created spectacular art, or written an incredible dissertation or novel, but how does that compare with creating toes or fingers or lungs? Incredible things happen in the dark spaces of incubation. This is also true of story.

As a professional storyteller for over 25 years, I have had numerous opportunities to incubate story. One of my areas of delight has been Christmas Tales and Legends. They are told in December and then shelved again in January. Besides Christmas tales, some stories in my repertoire are told and then laid aside for years before they are revived, while others may never be resuscitated.

Those tales that are set aside for months or years and then reanimated come back more than refreshed, they come back anew, different than they were – sometimes subtly different, sometimes radically so. The differences have little or nothing to do with intentionality; they strengthen, morph, brighten or dim “on their own” through the incubation process. We do not know what the stories “do” as they sit within us, unspoken and unthought of – but they do something.

We are not machines that simply record and later play back what was previously recorded. We are something far more like walnut trees or collie dogs. Things happen within us. Things change in us without our ever asking them to. We are of this natural world and what we do with story – or, perhaps, what story does within us – is part of this natural process. Stories are a part of the natural order of ceaseless change.

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Have you ever let a story “sit inside of you” without telling it for awhile? Did the story change? This “incubation process” is also relevant for negative stories that “water harmful seeds” in us. Sometimes the repeated telling of such toxic tales increases their power and harm to us or others. When we give such stories “a rest,” they sometimes lose their weightiness. Many of us can recall a story that deeply upset us years ago, but today it is retold with mirth and laughter. There is much that happens in the incubation of a story. What story might you want to incubate? And why?