I find it so interesting that even though it is Trajal who is using this course to share with us his creative process, by studying it we get to learn even more about ourselves than we learn about him. And Trajal seems to be very supportive of this: each time he talks about the importance of developing our own unique creative progress and of maintaining our “teacup”, I feel so encouraged to explore my personal creative process, even if I find out that it is different from my classmate’s.

This class helped me realize that inspiration plays a huge role in my work. I have read a lot of articles and “motivational quotes” about how it is the discipline and not the inspiration that leads you to great results, nonetheless, I found that whatever it is that I’m working on, if I want it to be genuine and meaningful to me, I have to wait for some form of a “click” in my head. Having a discipline might make it easier to facilitate this inspiration, and a conscious decision to work on something is obviously the essential part of any progress, but I personally just don’t feel like that’s enough for me. Through our conversations with other students, I realized that some of them just work by planning their time and allocating a specific hour or so for this “creative process”, and while I genuinely admire such discipline, I simply cannot sit down and decide that I’m going to come up with an idea. Similarly to how Trajal described his research process, I personally feel like I need to wade in my thoughts and influences for a bit before it all falls into place.

However, I was also reminded that you have to always be on the lookout for these spontaneous breaths of inspiration. I’ve noticed that for me, the different elements that seem to be floating separately amongst my thoughts can suddenly click together at very random times, and my main task in this process is to catch that idea in the moment – whether that means waking up in the middle of the night and stepping out of bed to sketch the stage set up, or pausing a conversation with someone to make a note on my phone.