I have been interning at Ritza for about a month now and I am still here, writing more, and loving every moment.
Apart from learning how the tools work and adding value to the company the main part of my internship is learning how to write, improving my writing skill through practice. The first article that I wrote took me about 2 weeks to get published, mostly because I kept changing the content overthinking every word. It is definitely a different ball game, writing for the public eye.
After publishing my first little article (which we had to limit to 500 words because my article became too ambitious, trying to squeeze my whole life story into a quick article), all I could think about was publishing the next. It was such a liberating feeling to get something I have been working on published, instantly putting an end to the ruminating. Once it was posted, excitement aside, I felt relieved, free to move on to the next one and start ruminating all over again.
Almost immediately after publishing the article, I started with the next piece, which again quickly became three or four different articles leading down the same path of never being published. Luckily as I started the painful process of ruminating over my work and avoiding the topic of me having to publish stuff, my mentor came up with a great idea to overcome my analysis paralysis.
We agreed that after this article I am going to commit to writing an article per day. Most importantly I will publish an article per day. The idea behind this is to get me writing, as the best way to get better at something is through practice. And with writing, it is better to focus on producing quantity first, the quality will improve over time.
In my case, I am writing about my career journey and the things I find interesting about it. The topic does not matter as much as the act of writing, so you can choose anything. However, when choosing a topic be sure to choose a topic that you will be able to write something on without needing to do research.
Because I tend to overthink things, It can take me days, even weeks, to produce a short one-page article like this one. I have realized that in the content creation industry, clients expect you to produce quality content quickly, and my rate of an article per week is never going to cut it. Thankfully my mentor also had a plan to help me with writing speed, I will not only commit to publishing an article per day, but I will also give myself only one hour to write the article. This will, over time, improve my skill a lot as I will become used to writing well in a short period of time.
The takeaway here is that if you want to improve your writing, write. Not only write but publish, as much as you can, this is the fastest way to improve in. The more you write the better you will become, or at least it will get easier to write quality content, quickly.
Until the next one...
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