NaNoWriMo participants do it every year. Fifty thousand word by novels in 30 days.
from the NaNoWriMo press release:
>During NaNoWriMo 2013:
>* 310,095 participants started the month as auto mechanics, out-of-work actors, and middle school English teachers. They walked away novelists.
>Over 250 NaNoWriMo novels have been traditionally published. They include Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants, Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, Hugh Howey’s Wool, Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl, Jason Hough’s The Darwin Elevator, and Marissa Meyer’s Cinder. See a full list of our published authors.
Granted, the BoM has around 250,000 words, but how many of those are superfluous and repeated words and phrases like: and it came to pass, yea, even, the Eternal Father, etc.? That's practically half a BoM sentence: "And it came to pass, yea, even the Eternal Father, Jesus, should come among his sheep." How many tens of thousands of words were directly copied and plagiarized from the Bible (Isaiah, Sermon on the Mount, etc.)?
If 300,000 auto mechanics, out-of-work actors, and middle school English teachers can write novels consisting of 50,000 words in 30 days, that means 150,000 words in 90 days is possible. A 250,000 word BoM in 90 days? Hardly an "impossible literary feat". Totally doable once you eliminate all of the superfluous, filler words and phrases that litter the BoM as well as from straight up plagiarizing the Bible.
If regular Joes and Janes can crank out a 50,000 word novel in 30 days, even while dealing with full-time jobs, families, etc., then an unemployed twenty-five year old Joseph Smith could easily have dictated to another twenty-five year old school teacher a 250,000 word Book of Mormon in 90 days. Add in the thousands of words taken straight from the Bible and it's absolutely possible to "write" the Book of Mormon in 90 days, especially after having brewed upon the characters, places, events for several years before hand.
How do you work the year between Joseph losing the 116 pages and Oliver Cowdery's appearance into those 90 days? Joseph had ample time to stew over a story, characters, events, places for at least a year before the "miraculous" 90 days.
Plus, dictating a story is much different than writing it. Oral (illiterate) storytellers have been around for thousands of years. Joseph simply told Oliver the story that had been brewing in his head.
How does anybody come up with a good story?
Some people are natural story tellers. Joseph was one. He could put his face in a hat and tell a tale. Scribes (mainly Oliver) simply wrote it down as he went. According to Joseph's mother, Lucy, he was telling tales about the ancient peoples of America as a youngster. He was fascinated by the Native Americans and his imagination swelled with ideas about them. It was a common idea of Joseph's day that the Indians were one of the Lost Tribes of Israel. That was not unique with the Book of Mormon. It's not that big a leap to tell a story that has been brewing and percolating in your head for years. I'm sure if you ask J.K. Rowling or G.R.R. Martin, they will tell you that those characters have been knocking around in their psyche years before they wrote about Harry Potter or Game of Thrones, respectively.
Joseph was a natural orator and story teller, as most popular pastors and preachers are. He could spin a tale over anything. Some early members came across what seemed to be an ancient grave site containing some human bones. On the spot, Joseph whipped up a tale about how it was the bones of a white, Lamanite general named Zelph.
>On 2 June 1834 the army crossed the Illinois River at Phillips Ferry. The Prophet and a few others walked along the bluffs and found a huge mound with human bones scattered about and what appeared to be the remains of three ancient altars. A hole was dug and a large human skeleton was discovered with a stone arrowhead between its ribs. As the brethren left the hill, the Prophet inquired of the Lord and learned in an open vision that the remains were those of a man named Zelph, a former Lamanite warrior chieftain who was killed “during the last great struggle of the Lamanites and Nephites.”
Sorry Joe, it was just a shallow grave. Joseph did the same when he claimed a pile of rocks in Missouri was none other than an altar that Adam used after being cast out of the Garden. No, it wasn't. It was just a pile of rocks.
Joseph was part of an oral story telling culture. Yes, he may have only had an "6th grade education" but he had a keen, sharp mind and memory. Being raised on the Bible year-in and year-out since he was a toddler (by his school teacher father, by the way), Joseph probably had much of it memorized. Over the course of his life, he could have easily memorized sections that intrigued him enough to make him think about starting his own religion. They were percolating in the back of his mind for years. He obviously pondered on them enough to deconstruct them and to reform them into his own theology.
Joseph could have been thinking about those verses for a number of years before dictating them to Oliver. Think about how pastors and priests can recite chapters of the Bible when they need to. Joseph was no different.
We are suckers for good stories