Growing Coconuts and Writing

Honestly, I am not a writer. About thirty years back I had to be confined to bed for nearly four years after a motor accident. I started writing letters to editor and short articles and sent to news papers. Some got published and  with the encouragement, I wrote some good long articles and I found they are good. I was sent few cheques with appreciation notes by the editors, that were very welcome at the time. Yes, you are right. I had to write them by hand. Personal computers were just arriving.  After 4 years and a series of operations I could walk and drive.  So I went back to my profession. Writing was  forgotten. completely……….. until I retired recently.

After my retirement, to keep me occupied and get an extra income I started doing freelance work from some freelance sites on the net. As there were large number of writing jobs available, I did some and the work done by me was accepted well. That made me to write articles to some sites and I am on the way to writing and am earning a few bucks. So.. What does that has to do with coconut growing?

When I was feverishly rolling out four five articles a day without getting any money my wife asked me what I am doing siting at the computer all the day. I forgot to tell you all that though I am a professional, I tend to be a generalist with with knowing little from everything so that I can talk or write on almost anything. So I found an analogy to explain to my wife that writing is something like coconut growing. Yes, coconut growing. For the benefit of those who are not familiar with coconut palms and how they grow and make an income for the owners I’ll draw the parallels between growing coconuts and writing.

Coconuts take four or five years after planting to start giving a crop and an income. It needs fertilizers and water to survive and needs minimum maintenance. But if the planter cares for the plants and the trees it can give a very good regular income (every two months) for forty to fifty years. If you have more plants you get more income. Even if you neglect the plantation for some time it will keep on giving a good income. for these reasons many coconut growers neglect their plantations during the periods of low coconut prices and high fertilizer prices.

Do I ned to state the parallels of writing and on line publishing. Writing and on line publishing in your own blogs, niche site or revenue sharing websites like triond, squidoo, and hubpages also is just like coconut growing.

My advice to newbies to writing like me, is do not neglect the work. I’ll tell from my analogy. Grow more and more plants. Care for them well. sooner or later you’ll get a regular income. Don’t expect your coconut plants to give a good crop in a month or two.