ways and means

Though in conversation or a drinking bout, Edmund Smith was always jotting thoughts and images. But he completed little.

[…]

[Christopher] Smart, being in a madhouse and denied writing materials, wrote much of his verse, probably including the Song of David, with a key on the walls of his cell.

[…]

[William] Mickle, being a printer, often composed his verses directly into type without taking the trouble previously to put them into writing.

—Chard Powers Smith, Annals of the Poets (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1935)