What It Means to Write: Creativity and Metaphor

by Adrian McKerracher

At a time when people must work harder than ever to stand out from the crowd, the word creativity can seem vague and overused. But what exactly is creativity? Adrian McKerracher travels from Vancouver to Havana to Buenos Aires, leading readers on a journey to discover poignant new insights into a life of letters. Through encounters with artists of all kinds, famous or obscure, McKerracher traces a socio-cultural history of the meaning of writing, each vignette a meditation on the way that metaphor limits and liberates creativity is a process, a possession, a relation, an algorithm, a game, and more. But What It Means to Write is far more than an archive of the figurative. Along the way, a labyrinth of chance reunites McKerracher with old friends, threatens him with violence, and invites him to remain forever in a place both real and imagined. His journey from cafés to libraries to late-night living rooms embodies the structure of a bold new methodology for interpreting creativity, demonstrating the tools for working productively with ambiguity and rebuilding meaning, one metaphor at a time. Told in character-driven narrative pulses that reflect on the nature of belonging, understanding, and loving, What It Means to Write is a celebration of the possibilities of both language and silence.

Genres: Writing

224 pages, Hardcover

Published March 4, 2019

Reviews

[Curt Bobbitt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Adrian McKerracher describes a research approach he calls "Critical Metaphor Literacy," which he defines: "learning to read the personal and social significance of phenomena by the metaphors used to narrate experience, and generating new metaphors that expand possibilities for thinking otherwise.”

The first half this personal reflection expands fifteen complex metaphors for creativity:
• Muse
• Madness
• Evolution
• Divergence
• Algorithm
• Incubation
• Illumination
• Play
• Place commodity
• Boundary
• Amusement Park
• Investment
• Organism
• Flow
• Democratic Attunement

McKerracher uses his own experience as a writer and his interviews with several writers in Buenos Aires. Near the end of the book, he explains his purpose: “The purpose of collecting and narrating metaphors of creativity was twofold: first, to show how any idea could be developed, nuanced, and brought to life by exploring the lived experience of the metaphors around it, and second, to emphasize the necessary incompleteness of greater understanding."

[Amanda Mitchell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before I say how much I loved this book I should first tell you that I know Adrian. Even if I didn’t, this book would have touched my soul.

This book is part travel log, part personal exploration and part meditation of the concept of creativity.

Through this work Adrian attempts to gain a deeper understanding of what creativity means by unpacking the metaphors that writers use to describe it. It is like using peripheral vision to get a clearer picture of a concept. It is a brilliant approach and the fact that he did this in a language he just learned astonishes me.

This book felt like you were walking in lockstep with Adrian as he wandered the city, following his curiosity and finding his place in it. He describes it all in a way that made my heart smile.

Highly recommend if you like exploring cities and ideas.

[Tanya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant exploration of language, storytelling, self, metaphor, and creativity. The descriptions of finding self in another language (Spanish) and another country/culture (Buenos Aires) were both lyrical and insightful.