Stories dominated my childhood. My parents were both actors and we travelled around with films and plays, in the days when a good letter to the school excused any length of absence. Until I was 11, I nominally attended a Montessori school in Bethnal Green, East London, but I had already started going to a drama club and getting television work and my absolute companions were the books that I carried with me. I would start with an author and read everything he or she had written before going on to the next.

Bags of dog-eared books, by anyone from Arthur Ransome to Alice Walker, attended my every move. By the time I started secondary school I had never sat at a desk.

Those first weeks in a classroom were a shock; I had no idea that such institutions still existed outside Enid Blyton novels. In their concern for my complete lack of academic prowess, my parents chose a private girls’ school in Central London. There were blackboards and laboratories and scheduled lessons, and I was completely out of my depth.

For several years I hid as often as I could, either behind a book or on mysterious errands around the school. For a whole term I stood in a cupboard for French lessons while the other girls suggested that I had suddenly been taken ill, again. “Sophie insists she has left her schoolwork in the New World,” read one report. “It appears she has left her mind there too.”

I would have spent the next three years in the corridors pretending to look for hair-bands had it not been for the English and drama teachers, who encouraged me to start working on my own school plays. All the energy that I spent at home, putting on street theatre, dreaming up new shows, was finally allowed to be useful at school.

At 15 I was working on films and television in the holidays and staging plays in the evening during the term. The last production was my favourite; a version of Genet’s The Maids. “It’s absolutely disgusting,” our headmistress would tell parents. “But I can’t stop the girls.”

At the time, writing was just part of the whole storytelling package and, in my bossiness, I happily wrote, directed, produced, performed and helped to build the sets.

I scraped through two A levels and left school to go straight into film work; a tiny part in a Disney film and then a lucky break in Steven Spielberg’s film about the young life of Sherlock Holmes. I carried on working as an actress and whenever I thought about writing, my old school reports would loom over me, quietly smothering the idea.

It wasn’t until I reached my thirties that I realised I could use all the waiting time on film sets and in dressing rooms to study. I hoped that getting a degree might give me the confidence to engage with my demons, those inner critics that urge you not to pick up a pen.

So for six years I studied with the Open University on planes, trains and caravans. The virtual classroom was liberating after my struggle at secondary school and I learnt how to write essays on time, within a word limit and to face the blank page. I felt almost ready to write.

But after years of studying on the road, I needed to be in a classroom. When the National Academy of Writing announced that it was taking applications, I took abandoned stories, novels and scripts from over the years and sent off the best bits. In January I was accepted on to the graduate diploma course.

The NAW is based in Birmingham at the University of Central England. It has the backing of plenty of extraordinary authors who have agreed to give master classes in their various disciplines. Once a week, for two years, our class assembles and discusses with the tutor. Although there are only 16 students in this new academy, we have all the university facilities at our disposal. Having used virtual libraries for the past six years, it is a luxury to be able to go into the analogue version and actually pick up a book. At first, it seemed as if the stories I wanted to tell were all but written.

Taking part in a writing workshop involves submitting work to the group that is then discussed in forensic detail by each member. The idea is to find something you like about the work and to suggest something that could be improved. It is supposed to be an objective process and personal tastes in style and genres are suspended. The hardest part of being in a workshop is not speaking while your work is discussed.

You would have thought that if there is one talent I have had plenty of opportunity to develop, it is the art of taking criticism. Theatre criticism and literary workshops may have a different audience, but they are both expert at finding flaws. The mistakes of every kind that survive innumerable drafts are a testament to the ease with which we fool ourselves. The trick with workshops is learning how to see your submissions with the same unforgiving eye as your colleagues, then not giving up.

Those who argue that writers have managed for centuries without creative writing courses are absolutely right. This doesn’t mean that new fiction cannot benefit from talented authors teaching emerging ones. It is an apprenticeship, a tradition established in other arts and just as valid for the written word.

I’ve done it all backwards. From no school to being the eternal student, I’m back to where I started, touring with a play in the evenings and going to school when I can. It is entirely impractical (family, travel, chaos, ruin) but it is what I have always known. And loved.

— Sophie Ward stars in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest until June 2 at the Nottingham Theatre Royal (0115 9895555) and from June 4 to June 9 at the Cliffs Pavilion in Southend (01702 351135, www.thecliffspavilion.co.uk ). sophiesofar.blogspot.com ; www.thenationalacademyofwriting.org.uk

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