Do certain transformational metaphors illustrate some key approaches to creativity?

We find our way in the world intuitively by noticing and recognising associations and similarities. The sudden apprehension of relationship connects, links, familiarises and underlies all that we see. Understanding is reached by arriving at a familiarising metaphor which offers us that charged tingle of recognition. In this way they help us to shape and make sense of our world. Perhaps key metaphors also offer us an insight into the creative process itself, approaches that we can take to improve our own capacity to innovate.

1. The ‘truancy’ approach embraces the wait (allowing insight to unfold)

‘The ball I threw while playing in the park, has not yet reached the ground…’ 

(Should Lanterns Shine, Dylan Thomas)

This approach sets up the need for a deferral, a dwelling time as a way to open up further possibilities in our thinking and allow hidden understandings to reveal themselves. It suggests that we need to find ways to detour and explore the hinterland of an idea in order to hold off immediate judgement.

2. The ‘rupture’ approach seeks seismic shifts (inviting dislocation)

‘The Earth turns over, our side feels the cold…’ 

(Poem Number ix, W.H. Auden)

This approach sets up how a sudden deliberately disorientating idea can be a way to abruptly shift our focus, to disrupt and transform the landscape of our thinking. It suggests that we need to create uncertainty and dissonance that will breach the grooves of habit and force us to reframe and reassess our position.

3. The ‘immersion’ approach merges perceptions (dropping boundaries)

‘Now the day stirs. Colour returns. The day waves yellow with all its crops…’ 

(The Waves, Virginia Woolf)

This approach sets up a more fluid environment for us to inhabit so that patterns and insights can emerge and similarities can be created. It suggests that we need to mix up the ways that we sequence our ideas so that we are given the chance to shape and move meaning around.

4. The ‘alienating’ approach extends perspectives (broaching the alien)

‘Over the cage floor the horizons come…’ 

(The Jaguar, Ted Hughes)

This approach sets up a radical consciousness and agency that enables us to see into the life of others and to relinquish ourselves and re-conceptualise our environment. It suggests that we take on a new self, set up a rival reality that offers us the chance to completely unhook as a way to escape our particular reality.

5. The ‘unknowing’ approach thinks aside/makes strange (transcending rationality)

‘The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope…’ 

(Wind, Ted Hughes)

This approach sets up the territory of our unconscious to purposefully encourage disorder and to explore the irrational. It suggests that we go beyond words and surrender ourselves to explosions of hidden likenesses and visualisations and tolerate chaos, in order to shift us beyond the known.

6. The ‘bridging’ approach mediates connections (challenging frameworks)

‘A sense of falling, like an arrow shower sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain…’

(The Whitsun Weddings, Philip Larkin)

This approach sets up a sense of connectivity that wants to fasten together different worlds and give us fresh eyes to reconcile incompatible ideas. It suggests that we need further explore the permeability of thought and shows that if we develop a comparative mind it will allow us to develop greater interdisciplinary thought.

7. The ‘exposure/abrasive’ approach sharpens sensitivities (cutting through barriers)

‘Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust…’ 

(Duchess of Malfi, John Webster)

This approach sets up our search to develop a beginner’s mind as a way to reveal our own ignorance and cut through the anaesthetic of our familiarities. It suggests that we need to strip back our world to bedrock, to uncover our vulnerabilities, in order to expose and break through our frozen thinking.