Nominated: Pulitzer Prize, ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award, Pushcart Prize, Frankfurt eBook Award (IEBAF – International eBook Award Foundation), and National Book Award. [I stole this from Harvey’s site because I knew he’d downplay his accomplishments, of which these are only a few.] Read more at his Web site Stonethread.com and check out Harvey’s new blog – Writing the World.

On Prose

R&T:  If you could give one piece of advice to those slaving over a manuscript, what would it be?

Stanbrough:  Keep slaving. Don’t make excuses. Most would-be writers experience an “application error,” meaning they have a problem applying the seat of their pants to the chair in front of their writing.



R&T:  What’s the biggest writing mistake you ever made?

Stanbrough:  I don’t recall one. The biggest problem I have with my own writing is the inability to “just write” and save editing for later. I tend to edit as I go, and sometimes I forget part of the story.



R&T:  Tell us a funny or strange story about writing.

Stanbrough:  As I lay soundly sleeping several years ago, my muse visited. I was teased awake at 3 a.m. by a beautiful line and I knew I had to write it down. I groped in the darkness for my journal and my pen, but unfortunately, my Early Morning Pen and Journal Indicator shorted out and sent a warped message to my Right Hand Guidance System, causing it to veer slightly to the right. My little finger brushed the volume control on my radio, turning the alarm to its loudest setting an instant before the heel of my hand depressed the Wake Up Now! button. As you may well imagine, things got hectic for the next ten seconds or so. The alarm went off, my wife at the time screamed and fell out of her side of the bed, and I sat bolt upright, straining to turn off the noise. My wayward hand accidentally hit the Touch Me/Light Me Lamp, which immediately sent it to Ten Million Watts. Then, with amazing agility for a man my age, I leapt from the bed and cracked both my shins on the bedside table while deftly avoiding my wife’s bedside lamp. With a sinking feeling (and once my eyes focused), I realized my pen and journal weren’t on the bedside table at all. I hobbled around the corner into my study, again groping in the dark, and finally found them lying on my Official Writer’s Desk in front of my Official Writer’s Computer. The whole time, of course, I was trying desperately to retain the beautiful, iambic line that had awakened me in the first place. Frantically I reached for my journal. My pen fell to the floor and rolled under my desk. By the time I retrieved the pen and began to write feverishly—you guessed it—the line was gone.



R&T:  How many cups of coffee do you drink per day?

Stanbrough:  I’m a caffeine-based life form, but I drink only about three cups of coffee on a typical morning. The rest of the day I maintain my levels with iced tea and/or Coke.



R&T:  Is there some easy way to understand POV?

Stanbrough:  If, like most modern novelists, the writer uses a limited-omniscient narrator, the narrator can describe only what the POV character can see, hear, smell, taste, touch, feel or think in that character’s chapter(s). You can have different POV characters for different chapters, or one POV character for the whole book. You can even switch POV from one character to another within a chapter if there’s a chapter break (e.g., the story changes in mid-chapter from one scene to another).



R&T:  Why do you offer writers a free edit/critique sample?

Stanbrough:  I feel it’s best to let my work sell itself. Providing a free sample edit enables the writer to see what I can or can’t do for her, and it also enables me to see a bit of the storyline, the writer’s style, etc. I only agree to edit a story if the writer’s style and/or the story line interests me, but that way I get to read what I want to read so I’m able to charge much less than the industry standard.

On Poetry
 

R&T:  Rhymed or not? Why?

Stanbrough:  Depends on the poem. When I wrote poetry, I wrote mostly unrhymed iambic pentameter (blank verse). That gave me the freedom of unrhymed lines and the underlying structure of the iambic rhythm.


R&T:  What did you do when you heard you’d been nominated for a Pulitzer?

Stanbrough:  I didn’t do anything that I can recall, other than smiling quite a bit. That was in the late ’90s. My most recent poetry collection, Beyond the Masks, was nominated for the National Book Award in 2006 or 2007. That was a really good feeling.



R&T:  Would you share your thoughts on the importance of strong end words in a poem?

Stanbrough:  As I mentioned above, the poetic line is the basic unit of the poem. Because it occurs just before a brief pause, the end of the poetic line is the strongest position in the line. If you read down the right side of a poem, reading only the last word or two in each line, you should get a sense of the strength of the poem. The end of the poetic line should never be populated with prepositions, conjunctions, state-of-being verbs (am, is, are, was, were, be, being, been), or other weak words.



R&T:  What are the Stanbrough top three poetry pointers?

Stanbrough:  I have only one: send me an email at h_stanbrough@yahoo.com and request a copy of The Craft of Poetry: Structure and Sound. Those (structure and sound) are the two most important aspects of poetry, and all my tips are in there. *It’s a PDF file, and it’s free.*



R&T:  What’s your favorite poem you’ve written so far?

Stanbrough:  “A Prayer.” Although, like Howard Nemerov, I’d have to say “I love all my children, even the squat, ugly ones.” Your readers can see a sampling of my poetry here. “A Prayer” and several others are displayed there.



R&T:  Do you believe in the muse/inspiration, or is poetry written through plain old hard work?

Stanbrough:  Yes, of course I believe in the muse and inspiration, but mostly because we have to believe in something. And yes, it’s written through plain old hard work. As Yeats wrote in “Adam’s Curse” about writing poetry, “a line will take us hours maybe / but if it does not seem a moment’s thought / our stitching and unstitching has been naught.” And Wordsworth defined poetry this way: “Poetry is the result of a spontaneous overflow of emotion recollected in tranquility.” The “spontaneous overflow of emotion” has to do with the muse, inspiration, and the first draft. But “recollected in tranquility” has to do with revision, polishing, the hard work you talk about.



R&T:  Why do you write poetry?

Stanbrough:  Actually, I haven’t written a new poem to speak of for the past few years. When I wrote poetry, I wrote it because I couldn’t not write it.