Sketchbooks: I hate them.
Maybe your sketchbooks are like mine? Page after page of incoherent scribbling, interspersed with one or two half decent sketches? I hate those artists who produce perfect sketchbooks, full of lovely watercolour sketches and calligraphic handwriting. Okay, so none of us are perfect. Here's some tips for getting the most out of your sketchbooks:
1) Don't call them sketchbooks. At school, the teachers gave us 'rough books'. They were cheap, throwaway books designed for all our childish scribblings. Because no-one cared if they were neat we were able to form our ideas on them. Perhaps we should treat sketchbooks as roughbooks and free ourselves up to make marks on the paper without caring that the results are pretty, which brings us on to the next point...
2) Concentrate on the process of sketching, not the end result. The important part of sketching is looking hard, and trying to make sense out of a three dimensional world on two dimensional paper. Pretty, finished, works of art have absolutely no place in a sketchbook. In a sketchbook we learn to look at the world and process what we see.
3) Once you turn a page, don't look back - at least for a while. You'll make plenty of mistakes in a sketchbook so don't let them get you down. Be prepared to make those mistakes and move on to the next sketch
4) You can't judge a sketchbook by the cover. The shops are full of lovely sketchbooks with lovely temptingly white paper. My shelves are full of sketchbooks with only two or three sketches on the first pages. We should be able to sketch on anything - the back of an envelope, toilet paper, an old magazine.
5) Musicians are lucky. When they play a bum note, the note is gone and forgotten in an instant. When an artist makes a bum drawing, the paper immortalises it forever.