It was a deliberate learning. I forgot everything I knew when I was beginning to learn to write. And I did this thing about writing one sentence after another, adding one bit of meaning to another bit of meaning.

— V. S. Naipaul.

“I’ve always been more comfortable making my decisions from the subconscious level, or more emotionally, because I find it is more truthful to me. Intellectually, I don’t think like that because I get uncomfortable. I’m more wary of my intellectual mind, of becoming delusional if I think of it too much.” — Tim Burton.

What, then, are the necessary conditions for getting one’s poetic work started?

1. The existence of a social task that can be accomplished only through poetic work. There must be a social command. You must have an exact knowledge of or at least a feeling for the aspirations of the class or group you represent.
2. You must have the material, the words. The storehouse, the reserves of your mind, should be equipped with the necessary words – expressive, rare, new, renovated, and invented words of every kind.
3. Means of production are necessary. These include a pen, a pencil, a typewriter, a telephone, clothes to wear when going out for food, a bicycle to ride on to the editorial office, a table, an umbrella to enable one to write in the rain, a room which one can take a certain number of steps (this is necessary for one’s work), connections with a clipping bureau in order to make sure of receiving a continual supply of material on subjects that are of interest to your district.
4. One must have formed the habit of elaborating words. This habit is infinitely individual and comes only after years of daily work. It covers rhymes, measures, alliterations, images, gradations, style, pathos, titles, plans, and so on.

Vladimir Mayakovsky,

“How One Writes a Poem”.

We are blind until we see, that in the human plan; nothing is worth the making, if it does not make the man. Why build these cities, if man unbuilded goes? In vain we build the world, unless, the builder also grows. — Edwin Markham.