Can you learn to be creative or to improve in creativity? How?

Yes, you can improve your creative skills, but it takes work, time and will.

The first question that comes to mind is where does creativity take birth?

Creativity is born out of observation. Those are the two subjects that each creative work is about. But observation happens only when you are getting bored. Every time you open Facebook or Instagram you are eliminating the possibility of boredom, and thus, of seeing the world and yourself.

Creativity arises after a long and deeply obsessive period of observation. Social networks and the Internet give you instant gratification that is not conducive to the creative process. So the first step is to stay away from instant gratification so that your mind can work on a creative task.

The second thing is to use your creativity to gain technical mastery. Whether you paint, write or compose music, if your technical skills fall short of your expressive needs, chances are your ideas won't be communicated efficiently. Everyone can create good ideas. But the difficulty is to complete a task, develop an idea and obtain a song, a painting or a novel. Those things require technical mastery.

And of course, one requires time and practice. Perhaps talent is nothing more than the result of work and patience.

When I was young I used to feel completely incapable of writing songs. And my father lived far away. There was no internet in those days, so we used to write letters and send them from the post office.

One day, not knowing how, we started writing by making verses. It was funny, it was like writing rhyming jokes. Over the time, the complexity of our letters increased. There are many baroque types of verses in Spanish. We were writing sonnets, decimas, Alexandrian verses, glosses, tersets, liras. I had to do some research, visit the library and read about baroque forms of poetry. We wrote like this for many years. Spanish is not like English. Our words are long and verbs are conjugated with many different endings so poetry in Spanish is much more complicated.

Over time I started to feel more confident about my writing and my song making skills. I still work in collaboration with songwriters, but I know I can write songs myself and when I work with songwriters I'm more collaborative and can contribute with better ideas.

So, what I mean is that creativity is something that you incorporate in your daily life. It's not like saying: "Hey, I'm going to write a song!" It won't happen just because you say it. You have to stick with the song all day. You walk, you see people, you hear them talk, you observe them. What are they doing, what do they care about, what are they afraid of, how do they talk. You whisper phrases that make no sense to anyone else, because you know that somehow that phrase has a hidden song waiting to be born. And then you work, and you make drafts, and sometimes you put a lot of them in the thrash can, and then you work on the details, and sometimes you look for help, and When you look for that singer or that percussionist who can get the best results, and that's how a song or a painting or a novel is made.