Word: working
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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HELP WANTED: Head of network programming. Experience in creating hit shows and rejiggering prime-time schedules preferred. Must be willing to work long hours in an almost hopeless cause...
...that struggle began at the age of ten when a disagreement with a boyhood chum over the description of a sunset ended in a fistfight. "It was my first literary skirmish," he says. Born and raised in Michigan, McGuane was introduced to the outdoors and a stern Irish work ethic by his father, an auto-parts manufacturer. McGuane early on developed an "adventurous image" of what a writer should be from Horatio Hornblower novels and books about World War II. "I saw myself on the deck of an Amazon steamer or something," he recalls. At Michigan State, McGuane edited...
...press. "During that period I was supposed to be living in the street, I also wrote ten movies, a novel and about 25 pieces of journalism," he says with annoyance. "Even in the flamboyant period of the '70s, I would say 85% of my waking time was spent on work. The day-to-day boring reality is that I was going to the typewriter and working...
During dinner, McGuane sips nonalcoholic beer and talks about an upcoming cutting-horse competition in Billings. Cutting, a highly stylized ritual in which a horse and rider "work" a cow in much the same way a defensive guard tries to block a basketball, is a dear topic for the McGuanes. They also happen to be formidably good at it. Laurie is Montana's defending cutting- horse champion, Tom was No. 1 the year before, and the two are the leading contenders for the 1989 trophy. "We take turns," Laurie laughs...
McGuane is alert to revealing parallels between the art of cutting cattle and the craft of writing novels. "You cannot work cattle by force," he explains. "A cutting horse separates a cow from the herd through a kind of choreographic countermovement. It's very much like fiction: you can't sit down and say, 'Goddammit, I'm going to blast out these sentences and send them to the publisher' -- this kind of John Wayneism of literature. You just can't." He finds the notion of a so-called Rocky Mountain school of literature equally specious. Still, he admits that "there...