Posted by Chris on July 06, 1998 at 13:49:02:
In Reply to: Joseph Smith - Boy Genius posted by SWN on July 06, 1998 at 00:29:18:
: If Joseph Smith wrote the Book of Mormon, then he was one of the most
: intelligent writers of our century. Within the Book of Mormon there are
: multiple complex story lines all related to each other in some way. Given
: his level of education, it would have been impossible for him to remember
: where one story left off and the other began, much less make up variations
: of all the names from the Bible. Can you name one person living today,
: geven simular circomstances and level of education, that could write a book
: as complex as the Book of Mormon?
How does an intelligent person keep sharp in the intellectual wasteland of a two-year Mormon mission? I'll tell you how I did it: I created a world.
In high school and my first year at BYU, I played lots of role-playing games. I was a BIG fan of Tolkien, and have always been impressed by the depth and complexity of his immaginary Middle Earth (I once shocked a companion by confessing that if Tolkien had claimed to have translated "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Silmarillion" from golden plates, I would have believed him.)
Anyway, I found myself bored out of my mind in the MTC, so I decided to create my own world. I thought I might use it for my own gaming after the mission, and at least it would entertain me in the meantime. I began by trying to fill in some of the details to the culture and geography presented in the Book of Mormon--basing my world in the Book of Mormon helped to rationalize the fact that I was doing somthing not directly realted to the Lord's work. That was the direction of my P-day project for a few weeks, but eventually I gave it up because, quite frankly, I found that it did not inspire my imagination. I couldn't make heads or tails of the geography either. If only I'd had Sorenson's, "An Anicent American Setting for the Book of Mormon," which is far more immaginative than anything I could extract from the BoM ;)
Eventually, I moved on. I found myself isolated in the farms and fields outside Rio de Janeiro, with few resources to build upon. All I had were my scriptures, some institute study guides, and an airline magazine with some good maps of North and South America, and some not-so-good maps of Europe and Asia. I started creating a more-or-less original setting. I started by drawing detailed maps of the main continents, and outlining the boundaries of the important countries. I created the cultures of these imaginary nations, their religions and leaders, their monetary systems, political ties, trade routes, history, laws and technology. Because this was a fantasy world, I threw in some magic and non-human races.
The most difficult thing was the names. The names of cities, nations, geographical features and important people all had to sound authentic or else the whole world felt wrong. Tolkien spent time to invent new languages and alphabets, with grammar and vocabulary based in real languages (he was linguistics professor). The best I could do was resort to my scriptures, the airline maps, and the things around me. Inevitably, the part of my world that most resembled third-world South America came out feeling the most authentic. I named the world Parador, because every day I saw a bus going to someplace by that name; I still wonder what part of Rio is the real "Parador." Looking back now, I can see how much of my immaginary Parador was tainted by my resources. Bible names pulled straight from the Old Testament or modified only slightly. I named one country Elam, and another I called Elazar--almost straight out of the Bible. I suppose that Hugh Nibley could argue that those are important parallels, and therefore my imaginary Parador has some direct connection to the Near East, but that's certainly not what I intended.
Big Bad Bill was the nickname of the chief of one desert boomtown. His real name was William Clinton. The presidential elections were going on back in the states--somehow I must have heard of Bill Clinton, but at the time I thought I was being original. I guess I wasn't. Believe me, even if you try, it is difficult to keep parallels from creeping into an imaginary world of your own invention. And Joseph Smith, the fraud, certainly wasn't trying to keep them out.
By the end of two years, I had dozens of pages of maps at three different scales, two notebooks full of history and geography, and a dozen ideas for stories and role-playing adventures. It doesn't take a genuis to create a complex setting with multiple story lines. It doesn't take a genius to taint or engineer his creation with dozens of parallels to the real world. It doesn't take a genuis to derive names from limited resources. It doesn't take a genius to ad-lib a story, which is the essence of the role-playing games enjoyed by imaginative teenagers across the country. Believe me, if Joseph Smith had been alive today, he would have made one hell of a Dungeon Master.