Jane Haddam

Robert said he had a rough day yesterday, and I had a rough day too, and I’m going to go into that in a second.   Trust me.  I couldn’t help myself if I  wanted to. But first-Robert says that, classifying literature the way I do, I should call poems or novels “most typical” instead of…

Anyway, that little public fit being over, let’s get back to business, even if I haven’t had a chance to have my tea yet.  That’s always an interesting situation, really. Let’s talk, for a minute, about what I mean when I say that one novel is “better” than another, because that may clear up some…

Given the comments that have come in, it’s difficult to know what to say first, or even what to talk about first.  I always start these things with grand plans for a perfectly argued, perfectly structured, architecturally elegant exposition, and then it all goes to hell. First, in answer to Cheryl–yes,  I’ve definitely heard the…

Well, Robert insists that he has use even for the hard sciences only because they sometimes produce practical results, and will tolerate history because it produces practical results, too, or could. I’d say simply that most people think of science as something that “does stuff,” and that the only reason they tolerate it is because of…

Okay! Let me try a few more things.  First, Robert wishes I would explain what it is I would teach, instead of what it is that is actually taught now, but I want to back away from that for a little while.  Yes,  I have very strong ideas about how the liberal arts–humanities, social sciences, hard…

Okay, before I get started for real, I need to stipulate a few things. It’s interesting to me that I can never seem to begin this particular discussion without getting sidetracked onto a million things that are also worthy of discussion, but are either beside the point or part of the point, but not the…

Let me try backtracking a little and see if I can make myself clearer. I was NOT trying to assert the superiority of the Ivy League over all other American colleges and universities–although for one reason or another, that’s what always ends up being under discussion when  I try to bring this up. What I was…

I titled an essay this once, or part of an essay.  It’s over on the main page of the site in the political essays, under the main title Why I Don’t Vote Republican. But in fact, the thing I want to go ranting on about here is not the fault of Republicans alone, or even…

Well, you know.  Sort of. Back to the writing of Cheating at Solitaire, anyway. I writer I like, who writes under the pseudonym Theodore Dalrymple, once defnied the “cult of celebrity” as the “marriage of glamor and banality.”  I wish I’d seen that definition before I started writing the book, because it encapsulates one of…

So, Robert wants to know about plots, and Cheryl thought writers analyzed characters, and in some odd way, those things actually go together. For the plots, first:  I know some writers who do a lot of planning.  I don’t know how well the planning works out.  I know more writers who have no idea what…