Novelist Tom McNeal, photographed with Link in his Coronado home
Novelist Tom McNeal wasn’t predisposed to becoming a writer. Growing up in Santa Ana, sports were his top priority. He played basketball and was the sports editor for his high school newspaper.
He did, however, like to read. He recalls an early favorite series of books he enjoyed as a child, one centered around fictional baseball team called the Blue Sox. “Each book was devoted to a particular player on the team. There was a book about the catcher, the picture, the right fielder and so on,” he explained.
Then he read Great Expectations. It was a school assignment, but he immersed himself in it. “It was the first novel that I really enjoyed,” he said. The experience triggered a life-long love of reading that eventually evolved into a love of writing.
Initially, McNeal didn’t think of writing as a way to make a living. It was something he simply did for the enjoyment of the process.
Then on a whim he took a creative writing class from Richard Ford at the University of California, Irvine. “I took it for fun,” he said. “It was a way to get attention; there were some girls in the class.”
Ford was just beginning his own writing career, long before he wrote Independence Day. But for McNeal, meeting Ford was a revelation. For the first time, McNeal realized that “writing could be done by normal, serious, dedicated people.”
Ford recognized McNeal’s talent, but it was John L’Heureux, author of The Shrine at Altamira, who encouraged McNeal to write fiction. One day, seemingly out of the blue, L’Heureux told McNeal that he wanted to talk to him about his career. “It came at me sideways,” McNeal said. “I never thought of myself as having a career in writing.”
With the encouragement from Ford and L’Heureux, he knew that someday his stories would be published. McNeal believes he possesses self-efficacy. “You just know in your gut that you will succeed at something you really want to do,” he said.
His career followed a traditional trajectory. His work first appeared in literary magazines, then mass market ones. Seeing his work in The Atlantic and Playboy were breakthough occasions. “I don’t think my friends were really interested in what I was writing until one of my stories appeared in Playboy,” he laughed.
He eventually evolved into a novelist. “Again, I slid into it sideways,” he said. He had a series of short stories that L’Heureux thought were worth publishing and he suggested that McNeal show them to his agent Peter Matson. Two weeks later Matson sold the collection to an editor at Random House, who thought the book could be turned into a novel with just a little tweaking “That was a big fat lie,” McNeal said. “It took two years to convert it to a novel.” The book was Goodnight Nebraska. It sold well and won accolades from critic. The Sunday Times of London called it “A really wonderful novel, strange, sensuous, bold and unbearably moving.”
After finding success as a novelist, McNeal’s career went sideways again. He began writing young adult fiction, first with his wife Laura, and then eventually on his own.
It began when Laura was working on a novel about a girl named Clare and a boy named Amos. Tom asked to write the boy chapters. The book became “Crooked,” which sold over 100 thousand copies. The couple would go on to write young adult novels together and individually.
McNeal says he finds the experience of writing with his wife and writing solo are both rewarding, yet different. When he writes with Laura, McNeal finds that he’s blending a lot. “You write one chapter, the person takes it from there, and things go in very different directions,” he said.
Writing alone is a more direct. “There are fewer distractions and detours,” McNeal said. “I love to sit down and create a world of my own making, and then see what I think and feel about that world.”
He fashions those worlds for both adults and adolescents and has been successful in both genres. His To Be Sung Underwater was warmly received, with USA Today calling it one of the best books of 2011. His young adult novel Far, Far Away, was nominated for a National Book Award two years later.
Despite his critical success as an author, McNeal still works a day job. Early on, he taught creative writing. “I love to teach, but I can’t say that I miss it. I drew from the same well [as when writing] and it brought my own writing time down,” he said.
So McNeal formed a property management company with his brother and brother-in-law. “It’s a better balance for me to have a different kind of work,” he said. “It exposes me to a range of people I would never have otherwise met.”
Being in the property trade also allowed him to achieve one of his three goals in life, to build his own home. Having kids and writing a novel were the other two; in addition to the three novels he has written with Laura, the couple has two sons. As a result, McNeal is comfortable with his accomplishments.
“If I never publish another book again, I will [still] be satisfied,” he said. That is not the case for writing. “I need to write. When I don’t get writing time, I’m not the best company in the world.”
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Gloria Tierney
Staff Writer
eCoronado.com
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