regshoe

this short story, which appears (with very few changes) as one of the later chapters in the novel Sir Isumbras at the Ford.

That's a very nice thing to be able to track.

I was struck at the time by the method of turning a short story into a novel by exploring the background of one incident, rather than by simply expanding the plot into book form, and this discussion of her writing process really puts that in context.

M. John Harrison has a similar technique: I have seen him both elaborate the plot of a short story across a novel and incorporate short stories wholesale as chapters within a novel, sometimes in the same book; it's especially visible in The Course of the Heart (1992), which contains remixes or inclusions of four identifiable stories. I write by accretion myself, but not at novel-length. I don't mostly write by incorporation, but there are a couple of places it's happened.