Great content takes time. This is no surprise, but producing great content also take practice. And if you practice every day, then you don’t get a lot of time.

Since I’m new at writing content, the closest analogy I can produce is to programming.

Parts of the Skill

First of all, I recognize that there are different parts of writing. There’s writing and editing. But there is also finding that initial inspiration and doing research for the content you’re writing.

As an engineer, I need to practice coding and debugging, but quite often project planning and refactoring too.

Practicing a Single Part

By just producing content every day, inspired by 500 Words A Day, what I’m really practicing is just one part of the larger skill. This is just the writing part of creating written content.

The equivalent in engineering is just practicing coding (i.e. only writing code). You can produce poor code that technically works but is impossible to maintain. For non-programmers, I’ll compare this back to writing…

I can write grammatically correct sentences. I can group these sentences into paragraphs. It might not even make sense. And this content may not be great. But still, it’s written content.

Basic Practice for Beginners

But I’m going to argue that this single facet practice is necessary. As a programmer, you need to get used to writing lots of code. You can read about how to write code, but the practicing writing is what makes it stick.

Eventually, you start to recognize patterns. With those patterns, you can learn to write programs that have fewer bugs (equivalent to fewer grammatical errors or flow disruptions) or needs less refactoring (equivalent to less editing).

Both these examples are practice for beginners. You get good enough at these basic skills that you no longer need to practice as frequently.

Advanced Skill Practice

When you graduate beyond these basic skills, thats when you’re really getting closer to producing great content (or so I hope).

Although you could take a lot of time up front before practicing writing, it is much more effective having that writing practice.

This is the repeated and paraphrased pottery class quantity vs quality parable. Instead of repeating it, I’ll let you read a post about it by Austin Kleon. You are getting experience for what quality looks like.

So when you spend focused time with the intention of creating “great content”, you aren’t repeating mistake that can be avoided by basic practice, but you are producing content that goes beyond just writing and has content, story, information, and material that is useful and easy to consume.

Side Note

This entire post was inspired by the movie “She Said”. Although this is, if at all, a minor point of this film, the journalists Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor spent a lot of time producing the final article published in NYT. Although I already had an appreciation for it, this film made me appreciate investigative journalism even more and the skill, effort, and time that goes into content that these individuals and people produce.