"While you’re making marks and drawing, pay attention to all the physical feedback you’re getting from your hand, wrist, arm, ears, your sense of smell and touch."

"How long can your mark go before you seem to need to lift the pencil and make a different mark? Make those marks shorter or longer. Change the ways you make them at all, wrap your fingers in fabric to change your touch, try your other hand to see what it does. All these things are telling you something. Get very quiet inside yourself and pay attention to everything you’re experiencing. Don’t think good or bad. Think useful, pleasurable, strange. Hide secrets in your work. Dance with these experiences, collaborate with them. They’re the leader; you follow. Soon you’ll be making up steps too, doing visual calypsos all your own — ungainly, awkward, or not. Who cares? You’ll be dancing to the music of art. Carry a sketchbook with you at all times. Cover a one-by-one-foot piece of paper with marks. But don’t just fill the whole page border to border, edge to edge. (Way too easy.) Think about what shapes, forms, structures, configurations, details, sweeps, buildups, dispersals, and compositions appeal to you."

From "Lesson 6: Start With a Pencil" in "How to Be an Artist 33 rules to take you from clueless amateur to generational talent (or at least help you live life a little more creatively)" by Jeffrey Saltz (New York Magazine).

ADDED: If you're like me, your first thought was: Where can I get a sketchbook with square paper and does it have to be 12"x12"? What I bought, 3 minutes after putting this post up, is a Moleskine "sketch album" that is square, but is smaller — 7.5"x7.5". Here's the Amazon link. Bigger might be better, but you're less likely to imagine carrying it with you at all times. I'm not going to carry this 7x7 thing at all times, but I do look back fondly on the time before I had a camera and traveled with a sketchbook, and I do think things would have worked out differently if the paper had been square. In the old days, when I painted, I nearly always made square canvases. Something about the square, no?