How to start a journal – and keep it up

We're drawn to making our mark, leaving a record to show we were here, and a journal is a great place to do it.

Once you start drawing, writing and gluing stuff in every day it can quickly become a habit – addictive, even. Your attitude should be: "I can do this, but I musn't make it too intimidating." It should all be easy to accomplish – here's how.

1. Time yourself

A good technique to avoid giving up or getting bored is to give yourself 10 minutes maximum per day to make your mark.

Ideally, you'll go to your journal every day, and that can feel repetitive, so tricks like this are great for making it feel more doable.

2. Do not fear the blank page

Start by thinking small, so it's not too overwhelming. You don't need to create a masterpiece; you just need to write or draw something in the journal every day to get into the swing of it. When you first sit down to try, you may think your life is pretty boring and you have nothing to put in your journal, but as you start to think harder, you'll realise how much you see each day.

When I first started, I challenged myself in little ways to just make marks on the page, setting easy tasks such as writing a list of everything I'd consumed in one day, or a list of five things I saw, heard, smelled, tasted or touched. Another favourite exercise was dripping a blob of ink on to a page and blowing it with a straw. It's so simple but incredibly satisfying to make spidery, tree-like shapes.

As I began to see the pages fill up with images and ideas, I had this sense of: "Yes, I'm creating something."

3. Avoid screens

I find the experience of keeping a journal much more creative on paper than on a computer. When I write, I'm physically immersed in the world and slow down, whereas on screen, I use my senses in a less engaged way – and I skim more.

Something different happens to my brain when I put pen to paper: the pace of writing or drawing slows you down and gives you more time for thoughts to come in.

A nice exercise is to write, or draw, as slowly as you can – it's so different from the usual way we get stuff out there – via tweets, texts or emails in easy chunks.

Try pausing more often, and take your time to complete a sentence or draw a line, and you'll find it's a very different way of working.

4. Be destructive!

Give yourself permission to experiment, play around with material and make a mess. What does it feel like to rub dirt on the page? See what happens when you do. Above all, stop caring about the outcome. It doesn't have to be great, but exists as something you did that day.

The whole point is getting stuff on the page. Once it's out there, it can become fodder for other work; I had one page in a journal where I collected just white things, and it later became part of a short film – it's all material for other ideas.

5. Make your journal precious

A lot of people don't like to spend money on a journal because they're afraid to wreck it, which is understandable. I buy beautifully made leather-bound journals because I have lost my fear of the blank page.

My journals are precious in a different way. I love everything that comes out of them and I want them to last, to be durable. I don't worry about them getting wrecked, and I enjoy them more as they fill up. The more daring I get, the more unruly they become.

6. Collect everything

Anything you come across in daily life is great for a journal – a lot of my pages are full of artefacts I've glued in: a piece of paper I found on the ground that someone had discarded, labels from the Post Office, ticket stubs, anything with numbers on it, a thin piece of bright orange fencing from a construction site; anything where I really enjoy the colour.

All this stuff looks even better when you present it in a grid, or pair things together to see how they play off each other.

7. Make it random

I use a lot of chance in my work and try not to intervene too much – I'll just drop stuff onto the page and see what happens.

One great collage exercise is getting a magazine or newspaper, something with lots of nice colour, then cutting out circles from several pages of it, so you have around 50 of them you can randomly play with; combine the colours, see how they mix and match or drop them randomly and glue where they fall. It's so fast to do and very satisfying.

8. Just try it

Often, we don't try things, because we think we know what's going to happen: we make assumptions about outcomes. When you keep a journal, you realise that the really interesting thing is not knowing what will happen, and discovering an unexpected result.

To order Wreck This Journal by Keri Smith for £6.99 (RRP £8.99), visit theguardian.com/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846