Author: Natalie Hart

Voice: Other Artist

~ Natalie Hart ~ 2 Comments

I haven’t done a voice exercise in way too long, so here we go:

If you weren’t a writer, but could be any other kind of artist/musician, what would you choose? What would be your tools? why?

I’m pretty sure anyone who’s known me since college could tell you: dancer.

Before college, I circled around dancing, doing figure skating, rhythmic gymnastics. At Calvin, I made a beeline for the Dance Guild. I loved it. I reveled in it. By my junior year, I was dancing 20 hours a week. I was in fully half the dances in the programs. I joined the liturgical dance group at the church I went to. I took every official dance class Calvin offered. I even got to be in a Glenn Bulthuis video (an alumni weekend thing). I eventually led both the Dance Guild and the church program.

In New York, I didn’t dance, except for boogying down at parties. It was too intimidating. There were professional dancers everywhere and they’d surely know I was an amateur. When we moved back to Michigan, I started up again.

So I’d rather be a medium fish in a small pond, than a minnow in the ocean. I’m fine with it.

We went back to the same church, where I danced again. I got to dance twice as Mary while I was pregnant. Grateful doesn’t begin to express how I felt about that. In fact, I danced until my due date with both kids — dancing felt more natural to my body than walking (ahem, waddling), at that point.

And then came the true making of me as a dancer: we joined a multiracial/multicultural church that had a very different history of dance. Dances weren’t just something nice to do that might move people. Dances could change lives, they could lead the viewers to deeper faith, to faith to begin with. There was also a tradition of “flowing” — dancing as the Spirit moves you, without planned choreography.

Most of my favorite dance experiences are from City Hope. I’m both a more powerful dancer and a freer one. I only managed to “flow” once, but I have motions for a third of the songs we sing that I do in the pews. If the praise team sings a song I have a dance to, I’ll go up front (after making sure that my outfit doesn’t show skin if I bend over or raise my arms) and just do it, unplanned, no uniform. Lately, I’ve taken to waving my big ribbon (thank you, rhythmic gymnastics training) during praise and worship, mostly as an encouragement to the congregation during the tough time we’re having.

I’d always loved the storytelling aspect of dance, the ability to embody emotion, especially the angsty ones. The peppy numbers were fun, but the first dance I choreographed was called, “Gaelic Mourning,” and I went on to specialize in numbers for Lent and Good Friday. The Bible verse that best explains my approach to dancing is about something else entirely: Romans 26:8 (NLT), “the Holy Spirit prays for us with groanings that cannot be expressed in words.”

Is this the place to mention the dance others (not me!) called my “sex on a chair” dance? It was in good taste. I know this because nobody wrote a letter to school paper complaining about it. It was to Maria McKee’s, “Breathe” — “I will let you breathe through me, I will let you be through me.” If one is trying to embody those lyrics….

It’s funny, but as a dancer, I’m mostly word focused. I explicate the lyrics with my body. This is especially true in my church dancing, but it was before, too. Lately, I’ve been using a lot of enhanced American Sign Language, especially in the kids’ church dance numbers. It provides a wonderful framework. Someday, I’d like to put together a seminar for the Calvin Institutes of Worship conference on that topic. I think it would help a lot of churches who want to have dance, but may not have “pros” already in their pews.

I’d say it’s pretty clear that, if I weren’t a (wannabe) writer, I’d be a dancer, because I am one. But that doesn’t answer the “Why?”

Because I was made to move. Just like that character in “Chariots of Fire,” I feel God’s pleasure when I move and when I teach others to move. And I’m not giving that up.

 

 

 

Wonderful: Saul’s Fortress

~ Natalie Hart ~ 2 Comments

One of the best things about writing this novelization of the story of David and Saul is the research.

The world was very different 3,000 years ago (duh). To try to accurately portray what life was like, physically as well as culturally, I’ve gotten to do a lot of reading, a lot of Googling various obscure issues, like where is the nearest spring to Bethlehem, how far could a person walk in a day, what was Philistine armor like. I’ve even managed to use the Calvin College library without incurring any late fees (unlike when I was a student there).

There isn’t a ton of archeological information for that location and time period (approx. 1,000 BCE), so I get to make stuff up. But I’m always alert to new snippets of data.

Here’s how Saul’s fortress changed over the various drafts of the novel.

Early in my research, I found an online photo of a ruin said to be Saul’s fortress. The author said it was probably plain, nothing fancy or very large — not at all like the medieval castle we might imagine. All commentators agree that Saul, as Israel’s first king, was more like the top tribal chief than what we think of as a king. So my first imaginings of the fortress had it as one large building, a first floor and a second floor. First floor for public functions, including his receiving room/throne room, and second floor for private.

But then I read The Great Armies of Antiquity, by Richard A Gabriel. It described a building with casemate walls (inner and outer wall with stone filler in between) and a tower on each corner. So the fortress got a little larger and gained fortifications. In my imagination, the towers weren’t just tall, but they had low walls and crenellations on top so archers could fire at the enemy and then take cover. This is not in either the biblical or archeological record for that location, although there were fortresses at the time that had them.

I also imagined the fortress as being built up over time, my thinking being that the job evolved over the 40 or so years of his reign. When Saul first became king, he had the plain broad house, larger than a regular person’s house, but not out of the ordinary for a wealthy person. Then, as time went on, and the Philistines were a continuing threat, coming to within ten miles of Gibeah, Saul would’ve had the place built up. So I imagined a compound in a U shape: original house, a connecting long hall in the back to a new building the same size as the original. The king kept the throne room and private family quarters in the original house, used the hall for storage of taxes and tributes, and put servants next to the food storage on the first floor of the new building, armor bearers and some soldiers on the second floor. The cooking courtyard leads off this secondary building. A wall built at the front of these two structures contains a gate, much like a city gate, so visitors go through the gate, and through the interior courtyard before getting to Saul’s receiving room.

But then, today, while Googling water supplies near Gibeah, I found a link to a book that claims that there is only sufficient archeological evidence to support the existence of a single tower during the time period I need. Which I find more interesting. So now the fortress is the same as above except for one lone tower at the rear corner of the newer building (so the soldiers can get up there quickly and easily) that rises way above the city walls. There are stairs that lead around it on the inside, but once you get above the second floor, there are stones that jut out like ladder rungs, and the lookouts have to climb up the rest of the way.

Yes, I find this fun. But it also serves a purpose: to provide the reader with a richly detailed, plausible world. Soon, it’ll be in the hands of my beta readers and I’ll find out whether I succeeded. (Fingers crossed.)

Wondering: Realism and Faith

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In my second year of college, I went on a January term off-campus study program to the Institute for Christian Studies (ICS) in Toronto to take a course in Ontology from my uncle, Hendrik Hart. This was heavy-duty philosophy that  left me thinking so hard I’d be sweaty at the end of class.

As part of the course, we watched the movie, Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance — an often whirling sequence of images without dialogue, accompanied by the repetitive music of Philip Glass. (I’d thought we’d seen the sequel, Powaqquatsi: Life in Transition, but research tells me it came out that same year, and we saw the movie in class, not in a theater, so it must’ve been the earlier one.)

In our discussion afterwards, the teacher asked a question and then a follow-up question that provided one of those moments in which my perspective shifted in a heartbeat.

(I remember the person who led this discussion as Bob Sweetman, who was still, I think a student/Junior Member at the ICS, although he’d later come to teach at Calvin and then return to the ICS. I don’t think it was our Calvin professor, Lambert Zuidervaart, although it may have been; in a funny note, he’s also now teaching at the ICS.)

Anyway, the adult male who led the discussion asked us about optimism. The movie was pessimistic in tone, and so he asked us to raise our hands if we considered ourselves to be optimistic. Very few people raised their hands. Why would we? We were budding intellectuals, and feeling positive about things was not considered an impressive point of view. I may even have sneered a little inside at those who raised their hands, smug in my knowledge that everything was going to pieces.

And then he asked us whether we considered ourselves Christians. We nodded.

He made a half “hmm”/half sniffing noise that said, “interesting.” Because part of being a Christian is believing that God can act in the world and make a difference there — Christianity was an optimistic faith. Did we really think that things were impossible for God?

And bam. Self-righteous negativity took a fatal blow.

I could still take a hard look at how things were, but I could have hope because of God. I didn’t have to default to the negative.

That doesn’t mean I’m all Suzy Sunshine now. There have definitely been times when that promise of hope has felt like a whisper delivered upwind from five miles away — but there, nonetheless.

The real question

So all of this leads me to ask: is realism, at some level, incompatible with faith?

I know churches deal with that question at budget time. Do we commit to a course of action although we’re not sure whether we have the funds, trusting that, if it’s a faithful action, God will provide the funds? Or do we cut programs because we can’t guarantee the money will come?

If things are not going well in a relationship, where is the point at which the hard facts of history trump the hope that things will change?

Does faith always trump realism? Or does realism have to “win” sometimes?

I consider myself a realist who cries out to God for help, hoping for change, even a change of heart. Sometimes the situation changes, sometimes things get unstuck, sometimes I change. Sometimes not. I’m not so much a “God has a very specific and clearly itemized plan for my life” kind of person. I rely on the promises recorded in the Bible: God will always be with me, all things will work together for my good (not for my pleasant, but for my good), and God desires to give me hope and a future. I can make good decisions, and I can make bad decisions, but God will work with me to bring me around.

One of my best decisions was to join a multiracial church. But we’re in a situation with our church now that is tough and we’re feeling the sting of too much reality. We’re having some “listening meetings” this month, wherein we talk about what’s been great and what’s been not so great. These are good and important meetings to have. But the real question is what we do once those are over. What do we go with: realism or faith?

Not looking for an answer yet. Just raising the question.

 

Varied Creative Outlets

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I do a lot of big creative things: writing novels, choreographing dances, developing children’s worship curricula, maximizing the small spaces in my house. But there’s one thing I do for fun. It’s small. It only takes a couple of hours once a month or two.

I do the library bulletin board at my kids’ school.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The words on this are “O wild west wind, if Winter comes, can Spring be far behind,” from “Ode to the West Wind,” by Percy Bysshe Shelley. I had big plans to cover the books with a bunch of “snow” to coincide with an actual snowstorm, but we never really had one.

Library bulletin board, September

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I should’ve gotten a big, hairy rubber spider to staple up.

Library Bulletin Board -- Oct./Nov.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gotta love the 70% off sales at the end of a season — all those nuts and leaves cost my $2.

This month I was given an Olympic theme, plus the phrase, “Go For the Gold,” for reading month. I drew a giant open book at the bottom of the board and stapled silhouettes of Olympic athletes coming out of the book, added gold Olympic rings in the middle, tore apart a little picture book about reading and stapled four of the pages across.

The librarian loves it, because she doesn’t have to think about what to do. I love it, because it’s a little crafty thing with big impact. I already have plans for April, something with an umbrella and rain.

What little creative things do you do?

 

Strange Bedfellows

~ Natalie Hart ~ 5 Comments

Last week, my family and I went on a crazy trip to New York City — crazy because we drove for, essentially, three days to be in the city for one full day, an evening and a morning. Nuts. But fun.

It all started with a Groupon for a hotel in Williamsburg. We were thinking the Williamsburg we knew when we lived there: where our friends lived, where Michael’s band, The Haints, practiced and did weekly open mic nights at the local pizza parlor. We knew the neighborhood had been gentrified, with new hotels and everything, and were excited to stay there.

However, out hotel was in way South Williamsburg, in a Hasidic Jewish neighborhood. We were expecting to hang out with young, rich hipsters and wound up intruding into an old, old world in which we were not welcome.

It was fascinating to walk the same sidewalks (although not always: they crossed the street to avoid us if they could) with men with silky, long curls bobbing on either side of their faces, dressed all in black until Friday night and Saturday morning, when some men sported white knee socks, black loafers, UFO-shaped fur hats, and beautiful black and white fringed prayer shawls. The women were less interesting to look at, but that’s the point of their clothing traditions.

When I run across groups that separate themselves so fully and deal with strangers so suspiciously, I tend see their culture as fear based. Fear of contamination by the other, fear of dilution of belief, fear of female sexuality (which is actually fear of male sexuality, as if seeing the outline of a thigh or unadorned hair will drive men insane with lust). I have no problem with modesty and I appreciate the comfort they may take in their clothing traditions, the pride in expressing their culture so visibly. I admire their determination to be who they are in the face of pressure to conform to the wider society. But fear-based, nonetheless.

And then, upon coming home and doing a little reading on Hasidism, I come across this description of their message and lifestyle: they “stressed joy, faith, and ecstatic prayer, accompanied by song and dance.”

That sounds like my church, and like me. The white denomination I grew up in stressed knowledge of God, but my multiracial church stresses experiencing God, hearing from God, freely expressing joy in God, deepening faith and trust in God. I’ve been known to go up front and dance (sometimes planned, sometimes not), to raise my hands and do actions while singing, to twirl my big purple ribbon on a stick, to cry, to immerse myself in the experience of worship in a way that might make people suspicious of emotion in worship uncomfortable.

It’s interesting that a group that stresses joy in following God’s decrees is beyond strict about following them. When I read all those decrees in the Old Testament last year, I was struck by what seemed to be God’s tone: desperation. It felt less like a precise list of what you must do to be holy than a plea to do anything, anything to help you remember the Lord: as in, “Wear my words in a box and tie it to your arm, wear tassels on your garments so you see them flapping and think of me, write the words of the Shema on your doorposts — whatever it takes!”

Indeed, the people we saw in South Williamsburg must find it impossible to ever forget God and the history of what God has done for them. Even the simple act of getting dressed is spiritual. In my entirely modern world, it’s easy to forget God, to slide through my day without taking even five minutes to read the Bible. I’d had a strong almost-daily habit of Bible reading and prayer, but I’ve gotten haphazard again. I need better remembering. Not to the point of shaving my head and wearing a wig and scarf in public, but something. Something joyful.

 

 

 

Allowing Yourself to Be Seen

~ Natalie Hart ~ 5 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about loving those moments in a novel when a character is seen, truly seen for who they really are, by an unlikely character — those moments when there is evidence of deep and abiding love and understanding.

There’s a flipside to being seen, and that’s allowing yourself to be seen.

A TED talk by Brene Brown has been floating around a lot this weekend, shared on FB by multiple and unrelated friends. It’s about what a researcher was dragged, kicking and screaming by her research, to discovering was the bedrock of human connection: vulnerability.

She talks about how we are our own worst enemy when it comes to connection. We deny uncomfortable truths or emotions. We try to numb those things that make us feel vulnerable and wind up numbing all emotions. We work to perfect the imperfectible. We turn a mere vulnerability into an occasion for shame, which spirals us tighter and tighter into ourselves and farther and farther away from God and others. (This last one isn’t entirely from the talk, but from a book I read in college: Shame: The Power of Caring, by Gershen Kaufman.) We do not believe we are worthy of love and belonging.

I think back to every small group I’ve been involved with — whether it’s Bible study, house church, or book club — and I can pinpoint the moment someone was vulnerable enough to tell the truth about his or her life. Those moments changed each of those groups forever. After that, there was no need to put the shiny face on. No need to mince around and almost say what was going on. We could be real, because someone had the courage to be real first. Someone admitted that things weren’t perfect and were vulnerable enough to show that this bothered them without trying to laugh it off or put it into humorous context. Someone admitted that they made an error of judgment and asked forgiveness for it.

I can pinpoint that moment in a number of friendships. Someone who was really irritating the living daylights out of me told me she was lonely. Flat out. I was lonely, too. And we became friends in that instant, because she was, for the first time, a person to me. I took it as a sign that I told things about myself to my now-husband after two weeks of dating that I’d been afraid to tell a boyfriend of a year: I had the courage and the trust in him to let him see me.

None of those groups or relationships would have been so deep and meaningful if someone hadn’t had the courage to allow him/herself to be seen, bruises and warts and tears and snot running down the face and all. Those moments let the group live wholeheartedly.

That’s Brown’s phrase for how people live who do not deny or run away from their vulnerability. The wholehearted. They experience human connection because they believe they are worth of love and belonging. They love with their whole hearts, with no guarantees. They are compassionate both to others and to themselves. That sounds good. Really good.

I needed to hear this, need to practice allowing myself to be seen more often. I’d rather live wholeheartedly than half-assedly. I need to pray for courage.

 

 

Voice: Top 5 Novels

~ Natalie Hart ~ 4 Comments

I’ve been avoiding the next voice exercise because I hate coming up with lists of favorite things. Hate it. Makes me cranky. Here goes:

What are your top five favorite novels of all time? 

Every time I try to come up with a list of novels, I wind up with lists of favorite novelists. I wind up thinking about the different genres I read and whether my list would reflect what I read all the time versus which novels have stuck with me. I talk myself out of making the requested list.

I could probably talk you out of expecting me to produce the list, too. But I won’t.

In no particular order:

Cat’s Eye, Margaret Atwood

Fifth Business or What’s Bred in the Bone, Robertson Davies (I can’t choose between these two)

Bet Me, Jennifer Crusie

Lord of Scoundrels, Loretta Chase

The Lost Hero, Rick Riordan

What does this list tell me? It tells me I love novels that take place in Canada, romance, and kidlit.

I haven’t reread Cat’s Eye in years, but it stands out in the Margaret Atwood section of my bookshelf because it so accurately reflected the combination of anxiety and freedom that I experienced as a young girl in Toronto. It was the first novel I read that called out the emotional cruelty of girls for what it is: bullying.

Robertson Davies is on the list because I love his big-hearted classically literate style, his use of Jungian psychology, and his sense of humor. Things are always lurking under the surface, and they always come to the fore, where they’re dealt with lovingly. It’s how I’d like to live, embracing all the aspects of my human condition.

Bet Me is my favorite contemporary romance. It makes me laugh out loud. There’s a lot of great eating and cooking and banter. I love the kid fish expert who throws up when he eats too much. I love that the hero ties up the heroine and feeds her Krispy Kreme donuts. The hero and heroine wind up loving each other for who they truly are, and in the process, change each other. Wonderful. Hopeful.

Lord of Scoundrels is the best over-the-top historical romance. She hits all the tropes: big muscular man who acts like he doesn’t care about society’s rules; tiny beautiful woman who is intelligent and savvy and keeping her family together; two master manipulators who dance around each other, analyzing each word and gesture for what it means; they are forced into marriage and resist the idea that they may love each other. But it’s so perfect. Chase goes deep into what the characters believe about themselves and what they think they’re worthy of, and makes them face it. And change.

Making this list made me realize that I’d pick Rick Riordan as my favorite kidlit author over J.K. Rowling. I love me some Harry Potter. Don’t ask me to do anything when I’m rereading the books, because once I start, I have to get to the end. But I reread the Riordan books more often and learn more from them. They’re more disciplined, more focused. They’re funnier. He never wallows in the teenage romantic angst, although it’s definitely there. And I love the overt mythology. Out of all the novelists on this list, he’s the one I’d most like to be.

How about you? What’s in your five?

Wonderful: The Moment of Being Seen

~ Natalie Hart ~ 3 Comments

I love it when a character who’s been presented as mean, tactless, heartless, or downright cruel reveals that he or she sees the main character with perfect and loving clarity.

This often happens in historical romance novels, particularly between noble sons and their cold, distant fathers. I’m a sucker for it every time. And it happened in the mystery I finished yesterday.

In Alan Bradley’s novel series, Flavia de Luce is an 11-year-old chemistry buff and poisons expert living in a big pile of a house in 1950s rural England with her father and two older sisters. In the second book, The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag, her father’s sister comes to visit. Aunt Felicity is a blowhard of the first order. Every word out of her mouth is an insult to someone, especially to her brother about his house, his finances, and how he’s raising his daughters. She’s bossy, controlling, and Always Right.

But one day, she makes Flavia carry her painting equipment to the island of the ornamental lake behind the house so she can paint the folly (fake Roman ruins). Once there, she tells Flavia tales of her own childhood at that house, playing with Flavia’s mother. Harriet had died the year after Flavia was born, and her older sisters had always told her that she had, through being so disappointing that she’d driven their mother to go all the way to Tibet to escape her, killed their mother. And her father is constantly present, yet too absent to correct this impression.

So Aunt Felicity’s words change Flavia’s beliefs about herself in a heartbeat. “Good heavens, child! If you want to see your mother, you have no more than to look in the glass. If you want to know her character, look inside yourself. You’re so much like her, it gives me the willies.”

Aunt Felicity goes into detail, particularly about their mutual love for chemistry. But then she, who is presented as aggressively conventional, talks to Flavia about her passion for ferreting out information, particularly about murders. Because, really, what good would it be to be an under-supervised 11-year-old poisons expert if you couldn’t run around the village solving murders.

“You must listen to your inspiration. You must let your inner vision be your Pole Star…. You must never be deflected by unpleasantness…. Although it may not be apparent to others, your duty will become as clear to you as if it were a white line painted down the middle of the road. You much follow it, Flavia…. Even when it leads to murder.”

And then this, which is amazing advice to anyone: “If you remember nothing else, remember this: Inspiration from outside one’s self is like the heat in an oven. It makes passable Bath buns. But inspiration from within is like a volcano: It changes the face of the world.”

Stuff like that gets me every time. It does in love songs, too. The chorus of Alanis Morisette’s “Everything” sums up why:

“You see everything, you see every part
You see all my light and you love my dark
You dig everything of which I’m ashamed
There’s not anything to which you can’t relate
And you’re still here”

So it isn’t just the moment of being seen, it’s being seen and also loved, appreciated, embraced.

That changes a person, gives them courage to be who they always wanted to be, but were afraid of what others would think. So even though the moments are just that, momentary — Aunt Felicity goes back to being a bossy blowhard. Spouses drift around each other. Friends take each other for granted. We repeat lines in the liturgy unthinkingly — what we believe about ourselves has been changed. And hopefully our actions will follow.

That moment of being seen can be pretty momentous. And now I’m getting as sappy as if I’d just read one of those scenes.

Voice: 12-year-old me

~ Natalie Hart ~ 2 Comments

What did you love more than anything on earth when you were twelve?

Here are some things I loved when I was twelve: horses, Jesus, my friend Elizabeth’s older brother Dan, sitting on my window sill and reading L.M. Montgomery, pretending I was a baton twirler with a broomstick in the basement.

I loved my period. Somewhere, there’s a journal entry that waxed rhapsodic about how it was a wonderful gift from God. I keep looking for it in my papers, but I think I threw it away in my teenage years in a fit of eye rolling over my childhood earnestness.

I loved my phone, which I’d gotten by keeping my room spotlessly neat and clean for six weeks. My parents had read that doing something for six weeks made it a habit. Not so much. I got the phone and quickly went back to my extreme slobbish ways.

I loved my independence. By 12, I’d been riding the subway to and from school by myself for over two years. It was my job to take a first-grader along on that trip and I was starting to babysit in the neighborhood, so I had my own money. My mother hated clothes shopping with me, so she gave me a clothing budget of $12.50 a month and let me take charge of my own wardrobe. I’d been in charge of doing my own hair for a few years, which resulted in periodic rat’s nests in the back, but I made them (through neglect) so I fixed them. My friends and I roamed the city on our own, hanging out in the beautiful Mt. Pleasant cemetery, freaking ourselves out, or going from corner store to corner store buying candy and chips.

This independence wasn’t always great. I was only 9 or 10 the first time an adult approached me and made comments about my looks and asked whether I’d have sex with him. Sadly, this wasn’t an isolated incident. With all the hundreds of people out on the streets in Toronto, a lone, very blonde girl was an easy target for harassment.

That experience makes it difficult for me to give my daughter independence out on the street. I didn’t let her go to her best friend’s house on her own until the summer after she turned 10, and I’ll only let her go by bike, not on foot — my reasoning being that a kid on a bike is faster and more difficult to bother. And I took that privilege away quickly (but briefly), after she and said best friend wandered way farther than approved at a public event. I know I’m going to have to increase her independence, but it’s hard. I don’t trust people on the street.

What did you love when you were twelve?

 

Confusion and Curiosity

~ Natalie Hart ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been wondering about confusion and curiosity.

A few days after Christmas, the adults on my Hart side got together at my parents’ for dinner and a movie my parents adore: The Tree of Life. My father, especially, loves this movie. He’d seen it three times already, and will see it at least another three. He loves it so much and finds it so deep and affecting that he wants to show it to everyone he knows.

I did not have the same reaction. To put it mildly.

I was alternately bored, confused, irritated, interested, annoyed, impatient, analytical. I spent the entire movie in my own head, and not in any of the characters’ heads. I didn’t experience the story. I observed it. This is not what I prefer. I like story. I learn through story. And Tree of Life is not interested in storytelling.

But that’s not what got me wondering. It was our discussion afterwards, in which I was (see Beginnings for my admission) too negatively passionate. My dad was making a point, based on brain research, that when we are presented with something confusing and tense, our emotions are engaged, to which I may have screeched, “What?!”

Because, for me, when I’m confused, my emotions disengage, and I become skeptical about everything. And if I don’t trust the artist/thinker to lead me out of the confusion, I turn off almost completely.

However, what he said is close to standard writing advice: there should be an overarching story question that fuels the story; when the question is resolved, the story is over. In addition, there should be lots of minor story questions, in service to the overarching one, to keep the tension, and the reader, hurtling towards the end. In fact, I’m organizing the David and Saul story into three books according to this advice. Book 1: Why did Samuel anoint David? Book 2: When and how will David become king? Book 3: Will David be a king after God’s own heart?

This led me to wonder about the differences between confusion and curiosity. Imagine the body language of each of those states. A person curious about something leans forward, their face is open, they’re driven forward. A confused person is frowning, their arms might be crossed, which hunches the shoulders in. Confusion is a state someone is in. Curiosity leads a person to inquire and investigate.

To be fair, my dad explained himself better in a follow-up email:

The book I referenced was Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow by Daniel Kahneman. “Fast” thinking is intuitive, subconscious thinking and “slow” is rational, conscious thinking.  A very good book – full of counter-intuitive findings.

What I recall saying is something to the effect that we are more fully engaged, more alert and more attentive when a situation activates both types of thinking. For example, the Tree of Life film operates on the intuitive level through music and picture. But if it only operates on that level, we might fall asleep. By adding material that puzzles us and motivates slow thinking, we are more attentive, more alert and more engaged.

I can get behind that. With one caveat. Like with everything else, people have differing thresholds for stimuli. My extroverted husband is energized by crowd situations that overwhelm or exhaust me. My physicist brother-in-law understands things I can’t even begin to conceive. And the line wherein curiosity shifts to confusion, wherein a puzzle no longer interests, is shorter for some than for others.

In other words, in art, your mileage may vary.