What's wrong with being a hack?

Last month I met and interviewed Terry Pratchett, on the occasion of him being awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Bradford. By way of breaking the ice, I told him that he'd done good, for a former hack – a reference to Pratchett's early days as a local newspaper reporter.

"I'm still a hack," the Discworld author insisted, with no small measure of pride, and a pinch of defiance.

If we take the original definition of hack – writers who could churn out anything, for money and at short notice – then perhaps Pratchett is right. He's been writing novels since 1971, chalking up 32 books in his comic fantasy Discworld series, plus several more unrelated novels, picture books for children and non-fiction books.

But the term "hack" carries with it pejorative connotations, intimating as it does that the writing in question has been done for money rather than any loftier ambitions of art. Samuel Johnson, of course, famously said that no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money, and that great man of British letters has managed to avoid accusations of hackery.

And which among our leading literary lights today writes purely for the love of it? All those hardy souls toiling at the coalface of small-press publishing and payment-by-copies lit magazines, perhaps, but they are hardly names that get bandied across the breakfast table.

If being prolific and quick are indeed traits of the hack, then what of Neil Gaiman? Gaiman was named winner of the Hugo award for his novel The Graveyard Book this week, and was the subject of Damien G Walter's fulsome praise on this blog a couple of days ago. He started out writing comics, then did TV, has written children's novels and picture books, and also scripted movies as well as turning out bestselling novels … does this make him a hack?

And what of crime king Elmore Leonard – 40-odd novels, short stories, TV. Hackery? Martin Amis has written novels, of course, and journalism, short stories, literary criticism, and he rarely gets the label.

The word hack is derived from hackney, as in hackney carriage – the horse-drawn precursor of today's taxi (though the word endures today in the UK for motorised taxis). Hackney carriages were plentiful, fast and available for hire for a reasonable price – just like hack writers.

Hacks were popularised in the 18th century, in Alexander Pope's The Dunciad, which immortalised the Grub Street of writers laying down words to fill their bellies with food and drink, and later became a staple of popular fiction and film, as Robert Fulford catalogues in his 2003 piece for the National Post.

Perhaps we can blame Randolph Churchill, son of Winston, for the negative associations of the word. In the 1950s he successfully sued the People newspaper for £5,000 after they lumped him in with the "paid hacks" who wrote what the paper called biased accounts of the 1955 general election.

Conversely, journalism is one area where the word hack has been reclaimed with gusto, possibly thanks to Private Eye's constant use of "hack" and "hackette" to describe male and female newspaper writers. We in newspapers rarely admit to literary pretensions in our day-to-day work – today's newspaper is indeed tomorrow's chip wrapper (or tomorrow's cached archived data, to modernise the phrase somewhat).

I'd like to see the label more widely embraced, and I for one will stand up now and declare: "My name is David Barnett, and I'm a hack." In the past year, as well as my everyday journalism, I've written two novels, a couple of short stories, a radio sitcom and a comic book script … and a few Guardian blogs, of course.

I aspire to the hackery of Pratchett, Gaiman and Leonard, and I think every writer working today should do the same. There's nothing wrong with being prolific, inventive, writing for a populist mass-market readership and nursing a glimmer of hope that someone might bung you a few quid for it. If it's good enough for Pratchett, then it's certainly good enough for me. Say it out loud, be a hack and be proud.

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