There's not much room in short stories to do little and big ... or maybe I'm just making excuses for not always managing to practice what I preach
I have not long finished Agatha Christie's "
The Clocks", and it offers a neat little example that stuck in memory, if you can get a hold of it. I'll put the example in spoilers just below, but it's unlikely to spoil anything until Poirot arrives to point out what it means:
Christie was very good at this sort of thing, which she mixed up with very convincing misdirections (what seem to be the bigger problems) to keep your mind away from the little things that are starting to add up.
This has been, perhaps, getting away little bit from your OP, because some stories are deliberately made from little things, and that's different to deciding that a book about big things needs little things too. (Did that sentence make sense?) Even when the little things are not pivotal, they are still important. They give a story a sense of reality even in the most fantastic of settings. That sense of reality is what made Pratchett funny. It's what made Hobbits seem like real people and therefore made their plight important to the reader ... I could go on, and on.
I can't say that I've paid a lot of attention to the origin of the authors from Penforhire, but the recent post doesn't seem to fit. ... So maybe it's just you.
