There is a moment of conception and a moment of birth, but between them there is a long period of gestation.
There are some people the gestation period is like an elephant's and it's just years and years before they're ready.
Gestation requires protected space; ripening requires both permeability to the outer — and non-disturbance.
A writer works from the material she has, but it comes from the unconscious. Everything is stored up and one never knows what comes up to the surface at a given moment. A period of gestation is certainly needed, what Wordsworth called ‘emotion recollected in tranquility. ’ You cannot write about an experience when you are living it, suffering it. You are too busy surviving to look at it objectively. At least I can’t.
The birth of a true poet is neither an insignificant event nor an easy delivery. Complications generally begin long before the fated soul carries its dubious light into whatever womb has been kind enough to volunteer the intricate machinery of its blood and prayers and muscles for a gestation period much longer than nine months or even nine years.
I like to know what the gestation of the idea is, I like to know the foundation, and I do a lot of reading and research.
In producers, loafing is productive; and no creator, of whatever magnitude, has ever been able to skip that stage, any more than a mother can skip gestation.
Since the conventional belief about human embryology is that genes control the development of the fetus, the mother's role in her child's gestation is deemed to be not much more than providing nutrition, feeding her child.
Everything is gestation and then birthing.
