IDEA #20. Keep a sketchbook in which you record and illustrate your observations, thoughts, feelings, and experiences

The sketchbook has been around since at least the European Middle Ages, and much of what we know of the feelings and thought processes of our forebears comes from the combination of their words and their visual ideas their sketchbooks demonstrate.

Any blank paper—a diary, a purpose-made sketch journal, or even a pad of lined notebook paper—will do. The young person can be encouraged to jot down a few ideas each day or to make a commitment simply to drawing something—and technical proficiency is beside the point. The subject could be a piece of toast or an idea for a new spaceship; it does not matter. The point here is for the journalist to work at interpreting his or her own ideas or experiences visually, to keep a record over time not only of how once sees the world but of how one thinks about it. The individual who is comfortable representing sensation or thought, no matter how poor the product might be from an artistic standpoint, will in time become adept at making explicit connections between disparate realms of ideas and at seeing the world ever more clearly and independently.