In his book James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses, Frank Budgen gives an account of his many afternoons with James Joyce in Zurich while Joyce was working on Ulysses. Budgen noticed that Joyce seemed to start with individual words or phrases scribbled in small notebooks that he carried with him. These were transcribed into children’s school exercise books dedicated to each episode of the book. As he accumulated more material, Joyce transcribed the completed passages from one exercise book to another, crossing out the old material with coloured crayons. Eventually, there were many exercise books devoted to each episode. When he arrived in Paris in 1920, Joyce claimed he had over 200 such notebooks.
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