Planting Peanuts

One day (I’m thinking almost a year ago), a person took upon himself the responsibility of growing a plant.  There happens to be some raw peanuts lying around, so he decides that he will plant them and speedily proceeds to the internet for some research on how he should go about this.

Some hours later, he gathers some courage and plops two peanuts into a pot.  From there, he waters the patch of ground for a week or two and finally his patience pays off.  A small green tuft of plant appeared.  In fact, two!

As they grow, he notices that one is stronger than the other, so he dismisses the weaker one (though it still gets water since it’s in the same pot).  Some weeks later, the stronger plant halts in its growth while the weaker one shoots past it.

The originally weaker plant makes one very long stem that eventually grows outside the pot and smears up against the window for more sunlight.

After a while, he decides that the plants aren’t doing what they’re supposed to be doing, so he takes them out and plants a new peanut.  He reads somewhere that the peanut should not get water for the first few days (to make it hardier), so he leaves it.  After a while, he starts giving it water, but even after two weeks, nothing comes out, so he goes back to the growing board.

Finally, the person plants another peanut.  This one he makes sure does not dry out too much and does not get too much water.  In fact, he thinks he does everything correctly.  A plant sprouts and it grows in multiple shoots.  The person is happy with the result and lets it grow for a month or two.  The plant splays out over the pot and a part of the window sill, nothing like the pictures on the internet, but he braves on, hoping it will eventually right itself.

This is a peanut plant. (Source)

This is my (if you haven’t guessed, I am the unnamed person in the above story) peanut plant.

It doesn’t seem to be even the same species.  In fact, my guess is that it’s a weed of some kind.  Regardless, it is green and it owes its life to me.

This above scenario is often true of my writing as well as my gardening.  I start off with enthusiasm and plant my story.  As it grows, certain parts of the plot seem like they’re important, but then somewhere along the line another part takes the spotlight.  And then, even if it grows, it seems empty, so I start it over.  This one doesn’t even get past the planning phase.

Finally, I begin the story again.  It begins great with complexity and a lot of good things, but by the time I get to the end, it isn’t anything like I envisioned it to be.

A lot of times (in fact, most of the time) people who create can’t replicate the things in their head accurately in reality.  It is always better in the envisioning phase.

But even so, you have a story and it works.  It flows and you’re happy with it, even though it’s not exactly what you wanted.  Maybe you can fix it with some heavy editing, or maybe not.  Regardless, you’re proud, because you made it, and it grows.

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Quotation of the Week

Every week, I’ll put up a quotation related to writing or creation and tell you a little bit about the person who said it.  I’ll try to vary the speakers as much as possible.

"You see things as they are and ask, 'Why?' I dream things as they never were and ask, 'Why not?'" - George Bernard Shaw

Shaw was an Irish playwright as well as a socialist.  He wrote speeches and brochures for the Fabian society in an attempt to further their causes (i.e. equal rights for men and women and helping the working classes get out from under abuse).  His great passion was for drama (though he wrote a few novels and short stories) and he is best known for Pygmalion which he adapted for screen later and after that was made into a movie, My Fair Lady.  Shaw is the only person to have won both the Nobel prize for Literature and an Oscar. (Wikipedia)

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Read Speed

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I am a pretty slow reader.  But what determines the speed at which I read?

Science Daily posted this article in 2007 in which they discuss the different factors that affect reading speed.  I’ll do a quick breakdown for you.

1) Phonics

With this, you recognise words by decoding them letter by letter.  In other words, it’s the combination of letters that allow you to recognise it.

2) Holistic Word Recognition

With this, you recognise words by their shape.  Basically, your mind will already start recognising the word “and” just by the flat and then up shape it has.  (I’m guessing that most people will then confirm their suspicion, unconsciously, by turning to phonics.)

3) Whole Language

This one lets you know the meaning of a word by the sentence’s context.  As far as I understand, this means that you can guess a word in a sentence by relying on the rest of the words in it.  I’m thinking it works much the same way as figuring out the meaning of a word you don’t know.  The rest of the sentence (as well as the bigger context) gives you a hint at what word/meaning it is.  (You’d probably go back to a lower order method to confirm again.)

These three factors affect how fast you read.  Interestingly enough, they work separate from each other.  Each makes contributions to the overall speed on its own.

With the little that I know of speed-reading, I would guess that the higher up the order you go, the faster you read.  With speed reading, you often skip words because you already know what they are (i.e. “and”, “then”, etc.).  It works basically the same as Whole Language.  Also, when you recognise a word by its shape, you have no need to read it.  You know what it is and move on.

You lose speed when you read every word, but unless you have a very good database of words in your head so that you can recognise words without error, you’ll probably make some mistakes if you read at a complete Whole Language level (which is probably not entirely possible).  

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