Mornings and writings

Today is Sunday Night, or rather Monday morning. It is 2:05AM, and I have been reading articles on the Origin of the Book of Mormon. There is nothing to convince me that any other origin of the Book of Mormon could possibly explain its appearance other than Joseph Smith’s testimony. Of all these Alternate explanations of the Book of Mormon’s origin my favorite theory is the “Automatic Writing theory.” Automatic Writing is when a person enters a Trans and starts writing without knowing what he or she will write. Thanks to advances in technology, unlike Joseph Smith I can write with my eyes shut because I have a keyboard. Right now I am typing whatever comes to the top of my head in a similar way. I am trying to enter a Trans, and when I done I expect a book as well-written as the Book of Mormon, or at least a publishable article. Yeah Right.

I tend to write really weird things when I am tired. However, I write weirder stuff on the other side of my sleep pattern. When I wake up in the morning, but have not fully waken up I write weird stuff. In college I would procrastinate writing assignments, get tired at night, and then say to myself, “I’ll just get some sleep and work on it right before class so that I can write it when I am not so tired.” The theory was that one hour of well rested writing is better than two hours of poorly rested writing. The theory sounds good, but in practice it doesn’t work for me. When I wake up early in the morning I write crazy things. Even crazier than anything I am writing right now. In the early morning to me in my mind, everything makes sense, but when I read it a couple hours later after breakfast, I always would find some weird stuff in there. Sometimes it was embarrassing. The worst is when I didn’t have time to correct it before turning it in. I just prayed that the Professor wouldn’t turn in my paper to the honor code office on allegations of drug use.

Years later I figured out my problem; I would have at least two sets of thoughts while writing that would contend with each other. The first was the topic of the paper, and the second was my dream from the night before. If I start writing too early in the morning, those two ideas and maybe some other ideas seemed to mix. Dreams by nature are pretty trippy. I am surprised I did so well in certain classes. Eventually I made it a point to do all of my writing the day before.

I blame the whole thing on my history teacher William Hamblin. He told me that his best writing came in the morning because that is when he was most honest with himself. He said mornings were times where he could write down thoughts, uninterrupted by the day’s experiences. While wrote and published great histories in the morning, I wrote Political Science/Alice in Wonderland hybrids. Maybe I should have taken creative writing. Oh, I don’t like mornings. C’est la vie. (Have I written anything as good as the Book of Mormon yet? I still haven't opened my eyes)