Article published In: Language, Culture and Society: Online-First Articles
Creativity as messy interface
Fish and water tropes in writers’ descriptions of their practice
Published online: 17 March 2026
https://doi.org/10.1075/lcs.25026.chr
https://doi.org/10.1075/lcs.25026.chr
This article builds on ethnographic fieldwork in Iceland, including interviews with writers and other literary
figures. It shows how, in conversations and interviews, some interlocutors turned to aquatic and piscatorial tropes, both when
they described the literary field and when they described their writing practice. Drawing mainly on Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of
metaphor uses in everyday life (Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors
we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.), literary studies, and anthropological studies of
aesthetic processes, the article aims to show how the chosen tropes foregrounded certain aspects of literary practices in Iceland
such as everydayness, urgency and dealing with the unknown. Furthermore, showing how fishing can
be situated in a messy interface between human domestication and wilderness (Lien, M., Swanson, H. & Ween, G. B. (2018). Introduction.
Naming the beast–exploring the otherwise. In H. Swanson, M. Lien, & G. B. Ween (Eds.), Domestication
Gone Wild: Politics and Practices of Multispecies
Relations (pp. 1–32). Durham: Duke University Press. ), I suggest that the water and fish tropes point towards parallel structures between fishing and writing: Like
fishing, writing literature seemed to happen in a messy interface, oscillating between subjective planning and will
(domestication) and uncontrollable, unknown forces (wilderness). It is finally discussed how this analysis, bridging literary,
linguistic, cognitive and anthropological research, brings new perspectives on creativity and how creative practices are mediated
through language.
Keywords: writing, metaphor, tropes, fish, literary fiction
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Materials and methods
- 3.Encountering fish and water tropes
- 3.1A book is like a fish
- 3.2Connotations of fish and water tropes
- 4.Writing as fishing
- 4.1Creative writing as moving between immersion and distance
- 4.2Writing as being in uncharted waters
- 4.3Connotations of writing as fishing
- 5.Fishing and creative writing as a messy interface
- 6.Conclusion: New views on creativity
- Acknowledgements
- Declaration of interests
- Notes
References
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