Slow and steady wins the race

This is remarkably relevant to my last post, come to think of it.

For my Adaptations class someone is doing The Tortoise and the Hare. We're workshopping it on Tuesday so we have to read the original, read the treatment, and in theory read the pages of the script she's got done (in this case, because she is going first and has less time than later people, she doesn't have to have script pages done yet). Then we write up a 1/2 to 1 page feedback for her. I really like what she's doing with it, but that's not my point at the moment.

Before you click the link above and remind yourself of the story, what do you remember?

I would have said the moral of that story (or in Adaptation terms the "nugget") is slow and steady wins the race. Now reading it as an adult, it's the steady more than the slow that won the race. If the hare had just focused for any 2 minutes during the course of the day he would have won. Fast and steady is even better than slow and steady, just some people don't have it in them to be fast. Steady is not always easy either. I spent 4 hours reading copyright law yesterday and I had to force myself to keep at it. (The little train that could also feels relevant here.)

This morning I read an interesting - but I'm not sure how it's relevant - article for Editing about how the brain works. It was written for laymen, but still a scientific article about consciousness and how long it takes us to decide to take action, compared to how long our brain is ready to take action. They were studying EEG patterns to discover that your brain will prepare to take action a half a second before you consciously decide to take action. I'm not sure why he had us read all 38 pages of that unless he wants to talk about the minimum threshold for how fast/slow your edits have to be for people to be consciously aware of them.

Now I have to write up my feedback for the screenwriter, but like the Hare I'm having trouble staying on topic. And I have enough things due this week that I'm flitting from assignment to assignment when I really should probably be spending more than a half a second on each thing.