Q&A with 2012 Featured Author Tom McNeal
Tom McNeal is the author of the novel “To Be Sung Underwater,” which was named one of the Best Books of 2011 by USA Today and the Wall Street Journal. His prize-winning short fiction has been widely anthologized, and his first novel, “Goodnight, Nebraska,” won the James A. Michener Prize and the California Book Award. McNeal holds an MA in fiction writing from U.C. Irvine and has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University. He and his wife Laura are the authors of four young adult novels: “Crooked,” “Zipped,” “Crushed” and “The Decoding of Lana Morris.”
Where do you find inspiration?
Getting started on something is generally not difficult. Sustaining interest is the real problem, and requires the small wonders occasionally revealed by everyday life. Images or notions sometimes just present themselves; when this happens, it can feel like a nice little gift. I also get revved up by reading someone else’s good fiction. When I was a kid, I’d watch the Celtics play and the moment the game was over, I’d pick up a ball and head for the courts. I feel the same way now when I put down a book full of convincing characters and deft sentences—I want to go off to my desk and try to write that well myself.
What advice do you have for aspiring authors?
Read a lot, write a lot, and don’t quit the day job.
What are you reading right now?
“Olive Kitteridge” by Elizabeth Strout. It’s a series of linked stories set in Maine with Olive more or less at the heart of things. After a couple of stories, the narrative really takes hold and you begin living within it, which is what I crave as a reader.
What’s your favorite opening line from a book?
“Stately plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.”
I read the book a long time ago. I don’t memorize things at all well, so had to look up the complete line, but I still remember how luxurious and beautiful the sentence seemed when I first laid eyes on it.
What book has inspired or affected you in some way?
“Great Expectations” was the first serious book I read, and from the moment Pip is accosted by that shackled man out in the marshy cemetery, I was had. Oddly, this was also the first work of fiction that my father ever liked. Our 13-year-old son is now reading it himself.
If you could sit down at dinner with three other authors, living or dead, which three authors would you choose, and why?
What a frightening idea. I’m afraid the people whose work I love–Saul Bellow, say, or George Eliot–might find me wanting or, worse, they might not live up to my heightened expectations of them. So I’d go with writers with whom I am already friendly, starting with my wife.