How Can You Write A Book If You Don't Think You’re Supposed To?
A guest post from Inkwell member, Karen Staniland-Platt
When I was a young girl, I would sleep over at my grandparent’s every Saturday night. I’d sleep in the spare bedroom, my sleepover buddies a massive walnut wardrobe that loomed over me at night, a sage green candlewick bedspread ripe for the picking, and an ornamental brush and comb set, with shells embedded in the handles, that sat upon a glass dish gathering dust. The only other object was a walnut dressing table, an accompaniment to the towering wardrobe, with a three-piece mirror on top and deep-set drawers on either side.
The room was a bit austere and spooky really, and the lack of central heating in my grandparent’s council house only added to its unwelcoming air. However, the one thing I loved to do in that room was to set up the dressing table to look like a desk. Not a school desk but a professional desk, like I imagined an author to have, influenced by an image I’d seen inside one of my nan’s Women’s Weekly magazines.
A stack of clean white paper. A selection of pens and pencils, lids on, points sharpened, placed parallel to the paper. A school exercise book, the type with a red cover and space to write your name and subject on the front. And a typewriter, an Olivetti I think, positioned front and centre. This memory is very clear to me, but other than threading a fresh sheet of paper into the typewriter, and hitting a few keys at random, I never really did anything else with this scene. It was all for show. I was playing at being a writer.
That practise, of gathering the right stationary around me, and then not writing, is often repeated today. Now, I recognise this little procrastination trick for what it is. Back then I think something else was at play too. Potentially it still is.
I knew incredibly little about authors but enough to know they didn’t come from backgrounds like mine. They lived in homes with huge sash windows and stripey lawns. They sipped hot drinks from cups and saucers with flowers on, not chipped mugs with adverts for cereal on them. The grown-ups I knew had jobs like driving buses, cleaning or working for the Gas Board, and many of them had no employment at all. They worked all day, if they were lucky enough, largely at jobs they hated, and went down the pub or the Working Men’s Club every weekend for entertainment. They barely read books, let alone wrote them.
I wasn’t without books though. My dad has a similar passion for books, and although I have relatively few memories of my mum reading, she did take me to the library once a week, on the way back from the weekly shop. Even my nan had a shelf full of Mills & Boon. I wasn’t surrounded by stacks of books as I am today, but I did own a few, even if one or two had hefty library fines on them. I read Roald Dahl, Watership Down and Charlotte's Web, but it wasn't until I got into my mid-twenties and met adults from other backgrounds, that I realised I was quite poorly read, something I put down to my lack of university education. No one in my family had ever been to university. I had barely attended secondary school, had scraped a few GCSE’s, but frankly it had never been discussed as an option, either with my parents or at school, expectations for students in the area being so low.
It felt then, and still a little today, that the odds were stacked against me becoming a writer, not because I doubted my ability but because I doubted my background when compared to the writers I saw being published.
I am incredibly proud of my working class roots, and though I technically no longer live a ‘working-class life’, I will always believe myself to be working class. It is a badge I wear proudly, despite the many restrictions it has given me, particularly as most of them are imagined social constructs.
Today, I adore reading books by working class writers. When I pick up a book by someone like Kit de Waal, Natasha Carthew or Douglas Stuart I get to see myself in their work. They write about relatable situations, be they fiction or non-fiction, that I don't get to see in other writers' work. It’s not all Trainspotting or rags to riches. I get to read about values that deeply resonate for me, values like community, pride and loyalty, stories that are family-centric. It’s not that I don't see these in other works, they just hit different when they happen in towns and homes like the ones you grew up in. Most of all I enjoy reading these books because they show me that it is possible for someone with my background, my level of education, to become a writer.
Setting aside the resilience you need to become a writer, regardless of up-bringing, there are unfortunately other hurdles to leap. I am, as yet, an unpublished writer but am all too aware that the industry itself is dominated by those from middle- and upper-class backgrounds. Those who guard the gates can, quite frankly, be blinkered to who gets through them. In my non-writing career, I’ve been subject to japes about being from ‘up North’ and having a Yorkshire accent, and looks of horror when disclosing I didn't go to uni. In my early years I struggled to attend interviews, workshops and events that were London-centric and therefore out of reach because I couldn’t afford the travel costs. All things I hear being repeated by working class writers.
If there's so much to struggle against, is it worth it?
In a word, YES. In the same way we need more published writers of colour, queer writers and writers of different genders, we need more diversity in the socio-economic backgrounds of writers, too. If we don’t write them our stories will either be lost entirely, or others will write them for us, and not with the same insight our lived experience gives. Not all stories set in poverty have to be about escaping it, and only those who have lived in it can comment on the creativity they have witnessed, the love, the loyalty experienced. We aren’t all ‘Olivers’ desperate to be rescued and set on the straight and narrow by Mr Brownlow. We have tales to tell in which complex characters save themselves, not by escaping but by embracing what it means to be working-class.
It would be easy to be pessimistic about our odds, especially given relatively recent surveys that give us stats like only 10% of writers coming from households whose parents were in routine and manual labour occupations* and just 12% of those working in the publishing industry coming from working class backgrounds. But fear not, help is at hand. In 2021 Natasha Carthew launched The Working-Class Writers Festival, providing a space to inspire and encourage working-class writers, as well as fostering connections between agents, editors, writers and readers. More recently, this year saw the launch of The Bee, a literary magazine, podcast and online platform championing working-class writing and actively inviting submissions from both established and new writers. There are many other similar initiatives and competitions looking to raise the profile of working-class writers and make it easier for great writers to get published.
Let’s not forget that all writers, regardless of background, have things in common. The struggle to get words on the page doesn’t discriminate, nor our voracity for fresh ideas which leap into our minds at the most inopportune of moments. We are all wrestling with pen and paper, keyboard and screen, hoping what we write will resonate, inspire, change minds, shape futures or draw tears. No socio-economic differences make that any the easier.
Karen Staniland-Platt is a professional photographer and writer, passionate about inspiring women & girls to do what they love and to be seen. Find her on Substack at
, on Instagram or at her website:*2014 Office for National Statistics’ Labour Force Survey. Almost half (47%) of all authors, writers and translators in the British workforce were from the most privileged social starting points (NS-SEC 1), contrasted to only 10% of those with parents from working-class origins (NS-SEC 6-8). For publishing as a whole, including occupations such as editors and journalists, the figures are still highly skewed towards those from middle-class starting points: 43% as opposed to 12%. Taken from Publishing's Class Platform by Dave O’Brien, published May 4th 2025 The Bee
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Very nice work. Thank you for sharing!
What a great piece. 🤩🫶🏻