1. Always write on a topic that is close to your heart - a topic that moves you, stirs emotions in you.
2. After you have picked up a topic of your choice, start writing on it your thoughts in your own words. You can take content from other sources also but ensure that you do not resort to simple copy-paste. Wherever you are picking up content from other sources, give credit to the source.
3. Go through your content 5-6 times before you make your first baseline.
4. By this time you will have developed the speech structure in your mind. This will help you in visualizing the major features of the speech.
5. Take a break of few hours to half / one day before you start practising your speech. This is the cooling off period but helps greatly in speech internalization. Because in this period you keep the speech skeleton in your mind and keep adding features to it for enhancement. The features can be drama, dialogue, voice modulation, body language, props, and stage movement.
6. After the cooling off period, you start practising the speech. You can divide your speech into 4-5 major parts and recall key features, dialogues, words/phrases of each part. Also, recall the transition words/phrases from one part to the other. These will help in ensuring that you do not miss on the major/critical features of the speech.
7. Rest is practice. The more you practice, the better you get on your speech. Enjoy this part and keep thinking of enhancing the speech.
8. Relax on the speech day and enjoy your time on the stage.