The literary field offers an especially rich array of examples of the insight phenomenon and demonstrates that insight experiences occur outside the problem-solving paradigm of cognitive science. Analysis shows that the seemingly unitary moment of insight is actually a microgenetic sequence (a rapid sequence of developmental change) deeply imbedded in a larger developmental sequence. For instance, the insight of Dorothy Richardson (who is credited with "inventing" the stream of consciousness writing style) can be divided into the two stages of (1) sudden realization and (2) simultaneous negation of the author and emergence of the world of the novel. Insight is best understood as a family of phenomena occurring in creative work, which includes problem finding, problem resolution, synthesis, discovering similarities, analogies, increase in certainty, recognizing error, the "mot juste," and so on. Each kind of insight has several facets: the organizational facet, which serves to reorganize thought; the developmental facet, which is the microgenetic sequence; and the modality facet, which may be unimodal or crossmodal. Insight is neither a momentary flash nor a mysterious essence. Rather, it is a modality of thought with its own microgenesis embedded in a macrogenetic context whose post-insight phase may herald the beginning of a whole new project whose content is still unknown. Insights can be viewed as many small windows through which the prolonged process of creative work may be viewed. (Forty-two references are included.) (SG)