The only thing less fun than sitting with another round of pages to be red-penned and rearranged, is doing so while ice complicates the inside of your windows and your immobile extremities slowly sting, then throb, then numb, then become perhaps irretrievably blue and fragile. Writing is not a mobile activity and – rampant hypochondria and/or genuine illness apart – historically, it seems to involve being in bed more than might be considered entirely reasonable. The onset of winter always reminds me of my early days as a scribbler, reading about all those Russian and Irish and Parisian writers' lives in suitably louche and tormented novels, or short stories, or memoirs. One element they shared – beyond narcissism, absinthe abuse and athletic sexual angst – was the presence of one - or more than one - writer in a bed and occasionally putting pen to paper.

I began my writing career in bed and – especially in hotels – my bed-writing continues to this day. Initially, I thought this was my most stylish and convincing option and I couldn't afford to heat my tiny flat, so I wrote and then (in a number of different colours) rewrote my very short short stories while huddled under blankets in the far-off days before the convenience and added toasty glow of laptops. Best Beloveds, even the clanky old Amstrad (remember them?) was not yet a possibility.

This week, I have a choice of bed-writing in a Holiday Inn, or sitting next to a tiny portable heater in a university office so cold that no one else ever seems willing to occupy it. The office part of the equation means it's time to meet creative writing students at Warwick University again – and time to be reminded again of how horrible it is to begin seriously considering writing as a profession. I spent years either being mocked by a gnawing desire to write ... well ... something; or having ideas that were bloody terrifying, or unwieldy, or just plain beyond my technical capacities. Panic was never far away. I started to write before I knew what I was writing about and then fell into a pit of aimless and bewildered prose – or I scared myself silly because it seemed entirely unavoidable that my protagonist would be a man, or an older woman, or a child, or just someone other than me when I didn't feel up to creating someone other than me that morning – or else I'd need to write in the first person, or cope with a major timescale, or lollop off into an experiment in magic realism.

Christ, it was appalling. And, of course, numerous psychological logjams and nervous perils never entirely leave, but just at the point when I was as inexperienced as I could get, I was doing to myself all the most punishing and self-defeating and unpleasant things that a writer can. I was worrying that my eventual readers would hunt me down and cause me harm. I was refusing to interrogate what had come to me to be expressed and therefore – unsurprisingly – finding myself unable to express it. I was doubting every word before it emerged. I was neither considering the overall structure and meaning of pieces, nor really focusing on the practical details of making them communicative in case they just melted away under scrutiny. I was, in short, being scared.

Being scared is perfectly normal when starting to write – it would be foolish not to have qualms about entering another person's mind and perhaps not being as entertaining and moving and eloquent as one should when given such a splendid, generous and intimate opportunity. And handing over what is, in effect, a dream – that's stressful. Here is something of me and from me, and I have committed to it utterly and it is now nakedly in your possession and if it doesn't please you then I will have failed on many, many levels. That's a hard thing to even consider, never mind put into practice. And yet, without asking our ideas to tell us more, and risking that they won't, without throwing ourselves into the matter completely, and risking that our very best just isn't good enough, then we never fully know what we can say and how we might say it best; we never find how good we can be and how we can grow beyond that; we don't do ourselves, or our work, or our readers justice. Which would be a shame. And – scary though it feels to work passionately for absent strangers – it's not coal mining, it's not being a nurse, it's not marching in London to defend the possibility of being a student, even though there might be bother, or batons, or horses.

That's the other memory Warwick University campus consistently awakes – one of being a largely pathetic, but occasionally active student. This is the place where I took part in my first demonstrations, first found out how large and unpleasant police horses can be, first realised that a policeman can shove you repeatedly in the back because he wants to, because he can, because it will annoy you, because he would like to start a fight, because he would always win the fight, because he's a policeman and you're not … It was an education. I wasn't at Warwick studying creative writing – such courses barely existed then and I wouldn't have dared go near one if they had – but I was studying. I was able to do so, because I received a grant. No grant, no university: it would have been that simple. No three years to start learning how my mind actually operated, to become slightly familiar with how I think, to strengthen my ability to analyse and criticise and imagine, to present my thoughts with any kind of confidence. Who knows how long it would have taken me to begin writing without the university experience, or if I would have been able to subsidise myself before my writing earned its keep without the, albeit slightly evanescent, backing of a degree? And I am, Dear Readers, otherwise unemployable. And I do, Dear Readers, love writing more than almost anything else. And I am not, Dear Readers, in any way domestic. So perhaps a life wasted, a life unfulfilled.

And yes, my life is – at a certain level – a big arty nonsense that can be sneered at from many angles. And being a student will always involve self-indulgence and silliness and blagging. But I don't think it's a strange coincidence that the only people actively out on the streets and opposing the rape of our society are those with the time and the novel encouragement to examine what's happening and find it wrong. There are other paths to enlightenment and confidence, but a university education isn't something I would lightly deny a fellow-citizen. And the lack of an adequate primary and secondary education is already stifling, crippling and – I don't mean this metaphorically – killing a generation of people I personally have no wish to injure.

Without analysis and criticism, we can't get to grips with what may or may not be wrong around us – without a muscular capacity to imagine, we can't construct better alternatives – without support, we can find it difficult to believe what we have to say should even be heard, that who we are should be expressed: whether that might involve a sonnet that proves you're as human as everyone else and therefore entitled to consideration, or a love letter, or a job application that changes your life, or the novel that sustains someone recently bereaved, or the joke or the song that made someone smile after a shitty day, or the slogan that will tell a nearby policeman – Your jobs are next.

I'm all right. I got my education, my library books, access to my voice and those of others – so many wonderful others. Which is partly why I feel others should have that joy, too. Something to boost the National Happiness Index, minimal investment required. Onwards.

AL Kennedy will be performing WORDS, her one-person show, for Amnesty International at 17-25 New Inn Yard, London on 16 December at 7pm. All proceeds to Amnesty.