Creating Is Making

Transfers

Creation understood as fabrication — the shaping of raw material into a finished object by an agent who knows what they are doing. When we say someone “made a poem” or “made a decision,” we import the entire structure of physical manufacture: there is a maker, there is material, and there is a product that did not exist before the maker acted on the material. The metaphor is so deeply embedded that the English word “make” has become nearly synonymous with “create,” obscuring the fact that it originally meant to knead, fit, or construct.

Key structural parallels:

• Maker maps to creator — the person who creates is understood as a craftsman working with deliberate skill. “She made a beautiful painting.” “He made an argument.” The maker has agency, intention, and competence; the material is passive until shaped. This frames creation as something the creator does to the medium, not something that emerges from it.
• Raw material maps to starting conditions — every created thing is understood as having been fashioned from something prior. “She made something out of nothing.” “He fashioned a career out of scraps.” Even when we describe creation from nothing, the manufacturing frame is present as the thing being denied.
• Product maps to the created thing — the result of creation is a discrete, bounded object. A poem, a theory, a sculpture, a plan. The manufacturing frame gives the result edges and separability — it can be inspected, evaluated, exchanged, and owned as an independent entity.
• Skill maps to craft — “well-made” is high praise. The manufacturing frame imports quality standards: workmanship, fit and finish, durability. A sloppily made argument has the same aesthetic deficiency as a sloppily made cabinet.
• Tools and technique — the creator uses instruments and methods. “The tools of the trade.” “She has a well-equipped workshop.” The metaphor makes creative technique legible as a set of learnable, transferable skills rather than mysterious inspiration.

Limits

• Making implies prior knowledge of the product — in manufacturing, you know what you are making before you make it. The mold precedes the casting. But much of the most important creative work discovers its own form during the process. A novelist who “makes” a novel the way a carpenter makes a cabinet is writing to a formula. The metaphor cannot represent the exploratory dimension of creation where the thing being made is unknown until it appears.
• The material is not passive — the manufacturing frame treats material as inert stuff awaiting the maker’s will. But language pushes back against the poet, paint behaves in ways the painter did not intend, and ideas resist the shape the thinker wants to impose. Creation involves dialogue with the medium, not domination of it. The making metaphor hides this reciprocity.
• Making is finite; creating often is not — a manufactured product is done when it rolls off the line. But a theory, a garden, an organization, a piece of software — these are never finished in the way a chair is finished. The metaphor imposes a completion point that may not exist.
• Making privileges reproducibility — manufacturing’s goal is to make the same thing reliably. But originality — making something that has never been made before — is precisely what creative work values. The metaphor cannot distinguish between fabrication and invention, between producing another unit and producing the first of a kind.
• Individual maker obscures collaborative creation — the manufacturing frame centers a single maker. But much creation is collective, distributed, and multi-generational. A culture, a language, a scientific paradigm — who “made” these? The metaphor struggles with creation that has no single author.

Expressions

• “She made a sculpture” — creation as physical fabrication
• “Make something of yourself” — self-improvement as self-manufacture
• “A well-made argument” — intellectual quality as manufacturing quality
• “Making music” — artistic creation as production
• “What do you make of this?” — understanding as fabrication of an interpretation
• “Self-made man” — personal achievement as self-fabrication
• “He’s a maker” — creator identity through manufacturing frame
• “Make a decision” — choosing as fabricating an object (the decision)
• “Make peace / make war” — bringing states into existence as production
• “Made from whole cloth” — fabrication from raw material (also: invented lies as textile manufacture)

Origin Story

The Master Metaphor List (Lakoff, Espenson & Schwartz 1991) catalogs CREATING IS MAKING as one of several creation metaphors, alongside CREATING IS MAKING VISIBLE, CREATING IS MOVING TO A LOCATION, and CREATION IS CULTIVATION. Together, these form a cluster of alternative framings for the same target domain — creative activity — each highlighting different aspects of what it means to bring something new into existence. CREATING IS MAKING is the most culturally dominant in English, to the point where “make” and “create” have become near-synonyms.

The metaphor’s dominance may reflect the historical centrality of craft production in human societies. Before industrialization, most objects were visibly made by identifiable makers. The association between creation and physical manufacture is grounded in millennia of watching hands shape material into form.

References

• Lakoff, G., Espenson, J. & Schwartz, A. Master Metaphor List (1991), “Creating Is Making”
• Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. Metaphors We Live By (1980)
• Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. Philosophy in the Flesh (1999)