Physics Guy wrote: ↑Tue Nov 14, 2023 6:37 pm
The Book of Mormon isn't a novel. It wasn't rewritten and edited. And it totally shows.
How much harder is it to dictate a story from inside a hat than just to dictate it to a secretary while walking around the office? Dictation is hardly an insurmountable barrier to composition. Plenty of long texts have been dictated. Some authors still write that way, using dictation software. People who like it say it's faster than typing.
I wrote a first draft of a novel in exactly one year, once, working only a few hours a week. Lots of people write novels in one month, every year:
it's a thing. My novel's first draft was bad, but it was bad in ways that wouldn't have mattered if I had been aiming at something like the Book of Mormon. I had a lot of characters who appeared and disappeared again after just a couple of scenes. And I had a lot of arbitrary events in my plot that didn't fit into a larger momentum but were just orchestrated to set up my next cute scene.
No doubt my draft had lots of other flaws, too. Those were just the ones that were most obvious to me even at the time. I stuck with the project because I had gotten the impression that just filling the pages was an important obstacle to overcome. I confirmed, though, that that's not actually the bottleneck, if you want to write a good novel. The hard parts are mostly things that the Book of Mormon doesn't even attempt. That's maybe where Smith was smart.
Writing a long text is an effort, all right, but it's an effort like running a marathon. It's by no means superhuman. People do it. Writing a really good book is a lot harder still, but plenty of people manage to do even that, the way some people run ultra-marathons. A whole lot more people write mediocre long texts that have a few neat things in them.
Try it some time. Or get
WattPad and see how lots of other people have tried it. You'll never again be impressed by apologetic arguments from the text of the Book of Mormon. That Book took a talented and motivated author (or authors), and the particular kind of Bible-fan-fiction work that it is made a lot more sense in 1830, marketing-wise, than it has since. That's all that's special about the Book of Mormon, however, as a text. It's nothing that Smith, or a person like Smith, couldn't have done.
