Very grateful to friends M&M (for excessively lovely dinner last night) but also giving me a chance to opine/refine what I mean by the difference between hard work/working hard. I always get irritated when people in the arts (and writers especially) say what we do is ‘hard work’. I’m happy to allow that most of us do, mostly, work hard at it, but hard work? Well, my Dad was a labourer most of his life (except for the four years he spent in a PoW camp during WW2) – that’s hard work. I once spent one summer holiday working in a plywood mill where it was too loud to hear the person next to you, the temperature was a constant 30+ degrees – it was hard work for the time I was doing it (6 weeks) but I was lucky I didn’t have to do it for my living, for my life. I paid my way through university (and a good half of my 20’s) by working as a house cleaner – that too was hard work. But again, I didn’t think I’d be doing it forever, so the temporary nature (even if it was a ‘temporary’ eight years!) tempered the ‘hard’ part at least a little.
Cleaning houses – especially those that are not one’s own – is hard work because you go in, you make it all better and shining and gleaming, and then a few days or a week later you come back and do EXACTLY the same thing all over again. There is no appreciable difference.
And it’s the appreciable difference counts.
(Yes of course, this is a semantic argument, but it’s one that matters I feel, not least because we cannot expect the world to take us seriously as artists/craftspeople if we constantly over-state the difficulty/importance of what we do.)
It’s the Sisyphus thing :
‘Hard work’ is work that makes no tangible difference, you can do it, and do it really well, but tomorrow or next week or even in a month’s time, you’re going to have to do it all over again. And the reason this is hard work is because it breaks the spirit in the long run. (And no, not all work can be fun/enlightening/enjoyable, not all workers want work to be like that, some are happy to use the money from work to have their fun/enjoyment … but in truth, I think most of us do want more from our ‘work’.)
‘Working hard’ is what you do when you take it seriously, put all your effort into it, go at it with the same spirit as the ‘hard work’ above, but there is an appreciable difference at the end. You finish your first/2nd/9th draft. The garden blooms. The cake rises. The child grows into a lovely/kind/bearable adult. The new paint job makes the room look lovely. The new painting is done. The tech eventually finishes and a dress rehearsal is possible. The orchard bears fruit. You finally understand the quadratic equation.
Appreciable differences – what human beings like.
(All IMO. Obviously.)
Not Writing But Blogging 
Well put, well put.
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yes ok good and certainly worth saying. but surely what you are describing is ‘futility’ – exertion that is pointless, worthless – a pouring out of oneself even – or as you say, ‘breaking the spirit’. and hard work doesn’t have to be futile to be truly hard work. in fact getting even intense reward from our labours does not in itself stop it from being hard work necessarily. i completely support your frustration of our overly preposterous claims of extreme hardship and effort in the pursuit of making art, especially us lazy gits in theatre. and yes as an artist i want to be one of those that does work hard in that over-time-and-with-dedication-and-perserverance-i-might-do-something-good idea you illustrate. but i also know that when you make a book it is always through and with hard work. necessarily so. so what do i mean by hard work (because i am most certainly connecting great preciousness to your books/theatre/spiritual leadership and so cannot accept your defintion…)
my today’s lecture on Eugenio Barba talked about his idea of ‘extra-daily activity’ – putting maximum effort in to get minimum output and the very opposite of daily excursion which is of course all about minimising effort for maximum gain (lots of ideas about discipline and training and being able to consistently perform inconsistently in tension with the laws of real life behaviour). and so yes although this artist ultimately expects to make something consequential, in their practice, training and development is much hard work that may be very slow to show appreciable difference. not hard work in the sense of never making appreciable difference, but it is (canbe/shouldbe) hard work in the sense of requiring extreme effort, concentration, strength, determination blah blah blah wastefully far in excess of what is naturally required to make the same motions for everyday life, and often with very slight and slow differences achieved. and yes i want that from the artists i give my attention to – great if it looks easy but i want to know it’s taken some real wellie to make. a lovely quote from Barba’s ‘The Paper Canoe’ – talking about the expression japanese spectators use to thank performers at the end of a show: ‘otsukaresama’ meaning ‘you have tired yourself out for me.’ as indeed they/we should.
so your (for me troublesome) distinction between ‘hard work’ and ‘working hard’ (which i like) has me counterintuitively agreeing with you more than i do (if you see what i mean) so i will reach for my dictionary for a little semantic gamemanship of my own: put ‘hard’ with anything and you get a particularly male form of extremity: hard~currency/liquor/sell/core/porn/line/luck/cheese/man/labour/hat/headed/landing/wearing /on!
and you take ‘work’ meaning physical or mental effort directed towards doing or making something (altho i admit my dictionary gives another 33 definitions) and so i want to say ‘hard work’ is surely ‘willful exertion’ and by being willful it is effort we deliberately choose to make. and this i would argue is what makes all the difference in the world. iMo obviously.
and so yes yes i want to work hard when i go to the theatre and exhibitions sometimes, and yes yes this can be hard work not in the sense of the wasted effort that you evoke from your father’s labours and your own house cleaning days, but in the sense of consciously applied extreme effort. and i will not have it that that has to be only physical, but whether it results in anything of consequence is irrelevant to what makes it hard work in the first place.
so ~ now that i have laid down my semantics, i had better go think up some examples for our next conversation….
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Hah. I love you Mark. Very excited by considering hard as a ‘male’ definition. And wondering then, if there might be a ‘female’ definition (while simultaneously thinking how much it annoys me that we are so far so underdeveloped that our words are still massively gendered, cf the feminism that still didn’t come despite the purported presence of ‘post-feminism’ and leaves us with big/strong/aggressive words still sounding ‘male’ and soft/kind/gentle words still sounding ‘female’!)
Anyway … IF ‘hard’ is considered to be male terminology, might we be better served by a ‘female’ or less gendered word for same? Like full?
“It was full work to make this show/understand this book/engage with this art work?”
“She worked fully to create her piece.”
Hmm, actually I really like the idea of full-work/working fully. Might have to take it up.
On the other hand, did another reading of Tom McCrory’s Faith last night, with a view to the Shaky Isles’s production I’ll (hopefully, the money gods smiling on us) direct later this year, and Vinni arrived to read with us after working a 9 hour day as a dancer/choreographer. And I know that I always allow ‘hard work’ to my dancer friends, I just often feel it’s a bit extreme as a writer/theatre maker (not least i guess because I have very much bought into the Improbable – even pre-D&D/Open Space concept – that making work happens as much in the tea breaks/chats/lunchtime/over a drink as anywhere else.)
So perhaps I do feel it’s attached to the body, that hard work comes (initially? primarily?) of the body (rather than being futile), while working hard comes of all we can give – working fully.
Hmm, or maybe it’s ‘merely’ linguistics/sentence structure. Is it that I feel calling it ‘work’ at all, giving it the noun of work, undercuts the noun of the work itself – so we call the performance ‘work’ and we get rid of the word ‘performance’ in that sentence. And maybe I don’t want to get rid of the words that name our art/craft, maybe I just want ‘work’ to be the verb not the noun??!!
This requires FAR more knowledge of language structure than I possess, but I do think there is something around the value we give to nouns as opposed to verbs.
I intend to work fully today.
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yes yes yes yes
i love working fully
i worked fully today and it was full work.
and so now i am going to have a glass of wine.
yes yes i am going to use this as the alternative always for hard work/working hard and see how it plays… how wonderful…
love you too!
xx
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