Creating Is Moving To A Location

metaphor

Source: Journeys → Creative Process

Categories: cognitive-sciencelinguistics

From: Master Metaphor List

Transfers

To create is to bring something here — to move it from elsewhere (or from nowhere) to a present location. The created thing arrives. It comes into being the way a traveler comes into town: it was not here before, and now it is. This metaphor frames creation not as fabrication or revelation but as a kind of summoning or transportation. The creator’s role is to bring the thing to where it can be encountered, used, or inhabited.

This is a subcase of the Event Structure metaphor system’s location case. If STATES ARE LOCATIONS and CHANGE IS MOTION, then the change from non-existence to existence is motion from a distant or non-location to here. Existence is presence; non-existence is absence, understood spatially as being somewhere else or nowhere.

Key structural parallels:

• Creating maps to arriving — “The idea came to me.” “A new theory has arrived.” “The solution finally came.” The created thing is the traveler, and creation is its arrival at the present location. The creator may function as a guide, a summoner, or simply a witness to the arrival.
• Non-existence maps to being elsewhere — before creation, the thing was not here. “Where did that idea come from?” “The concept emerged from nowhere.” The metaphor provides a spatial origin story: the created thing had a prior location (even if that location is vague or mythical) from which it traveled.
• Existence maps to being here — once created, the thing is present, available, occupying a location. “The painting is now in the world.” “She brought a new genre into existence.” Existence is spatial presence.
• The creative process maps to the journey — creation takes time because the thing must travel. “The project is on its way.” “We’re getting closer to a solution.” The path from non-existence to existence has duration, obstacles, and intermediate stages, just like a physical journey.
• Failed creation maps to non-arrival — “The idea never materialized.” “It didn’t come together.” “The project never got off the ground.” Failure to create is failure to arrive, to complete the journey from elsewhere to here.

Limits

• Created things don’t literally come from somewhere — the metaphor implies a place of origin, but there is no actual location where uncreated ideas reside. The spatial frame produces questions that have no coherent answers: Where was the symphony before Beethoven wrote it? The metaphor invites Platonic mysticism about a realm of Forms from which ideas descend, which may be poetically satisfying but is ontologically suspect.
• The creator’s agency is diminished — if the created thing arrives rather than being made, the creator is more of a recipient than an agent. “The idea came to me” gives the idea the agency and the creator the passivity. This can be useful (it captures the genuine experience of inspiration as something that happens to you) but it systematically undervalues the craft, labor, and deliberate effort involved in creation.
• Arrival implies completeness — when something arrives, it arrives whole. A package delivered to your door is a finished object. But most creative work arrives in pieces — fragments, drafts, approximations that require extensive shaping. The journey metaphor has no good way to represent the thing that arrives partially and must be completed on site.
• The metaphor conflates creation with discovery — if the thing “comes” to you, did you create it or discover it? The spatial metaphor blurs the line between bringing something new into existence and encountering something that was already there. This makes it hard to credit originality.
• Where do bad ideas go? — the spatial frame implies that rejected ideas are sent away. But abandoned creative work does not return to some origin point. It simply ceases to be developed. The metaphor has no good account of creative waste, dead ends, or the graveyard of abandoned projects.

Expressions

• “The idea came to me” — creation as arrival of the created thing
• “Bring something into existence” — creation as transportation to here
• “Where did that come from?” — creative product as traveler from elsewhere
• “It hasn’t arrived yet” — unfinished creation as still in transit
• “The solution is coming” — anticipated creation as approaching entity
• “She brought a new perspective” — introducing novelty as delivering it to the present location
• “It came out of nowhere” — unexpected creation as arrival without a visible origin
• “The work has finally landed” — completion as arrival at destination
• “Getting closer to a breakthrough” — creative progress as approach
• “That idea went nowhere” — failed creation as an entity that did not reach its destination

Origin Story

The Master Metaphor List (Lakoff, Espenson & Schwartz 1991) names this metaphor CREATING IS MOVING TO A LOCATION (HERE), emphasizing the deictic element — the created thing moves to here, to where the creator and audience are. The metaphor is a specific instantiation of the Event Structure metaphor system’s location case (Lakoff & Johnson 1999), where states are locations and changes of state are movements between locations. In this frame, the change from non-existence to existence is the movement from not-here to here.

The metaphor may be grounded in the primary experience of objects appearing in one’s visual field. Infants experience new objects as things that come into view, that arrive in the perceptual field. Before object permanence is fully established, the appearance of an object genuinely is its coming into existence. This early experiential conflation of arrival and creation may persist as a conceptual metaphor into adult cognition.

References

• Lakoff, G., Espenson, J. & Schwartz, A. Master Metaphor List (1991), “Creating Is Moving To A Location (here)”
• Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. Philosophy in the Flesh (1999) — the Event Structure metaphor system, location case
• Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. Metaphors We Live By (1980)

Related Entries

• Creating Is Making
• Creating Is Making Visible
• Creation Is Cultivation
• States Are Locations
• Change Is Motion

Structural Neighbors

Entries from different domains that share structural shape. Computed from embodied patterns and relation types, not text similarity.

• Time Is Stationary and We Move Through It (embodied-experience/metaphor) path, near-far, container, cause, transform
• Holy Grail (mythology/metaphor) path, near-far, cause, transform
• Time Is a Moving Object (embodied-experience/metaphor) path, near-far, cause, transform
• Time Is Movement (movement/metaphor) path, near-far, cause, transform
• Death Is a Journey (travel/metaphor) path, near-far, cause, transform
• The Internet Is a Mine (natural-resources/metaphor) container, cause, transform
• Time Is a River (fluid-dynamics/metaphor) path, cause, transform
• Give Actions, Not Emotions (theatrical-directing/mental-model) path, cause, transform

Structural Tags

Patterns: pathnear-farcontainer

Relations: causetransform

Structure: pipeline Level: generic

Contributors: agent:metaphorex-miner