I published “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain” in 2021 and, at that point, suddenly, I seemed to be espousing a method. I’d get notes from people saying things like, “I’d love to see if your method can be applied to (name of story),” the implication (correct, by the way) being that not all stories worked by way of causality, escalation, specificity, etc. (The story named was often perceived to be of a more experimental, or gauzy, or language-based/plotless/dreamy type of story).
But really, at heart, my “method,” if there is one, is much simpler than that.