No, not talking about why you shouldn’t publicly trash other writers/artists/musicians/who have you. I’m thinking about what the British used to call “an Aga saga,” after the stove brand. These are domestic stories, and stories in a small world, often with somewhat “small” stakes. Not small to the characters, no, but small to the greater world. Dave Freer’s Joy Cometh with the Mourning might be one example, except it is closer to a cozy mystery. Jan Karon’s Mitford novels are the best American sample that I’m familiar with.
Think of books that focus on relationships in a small setting, be it a family, or a parish, or a small town. Great earthshaking events don’t usually happen, but there are still unwanted surprises, good and bad news, stress, but even more resolutions, learning to cope with the unwanted surprises, happiness, and a good outcome (or the promise of a good outcome eventually). In the Jan Karon novels, a good man finds a lady, a woman finds her lost children, a deeply unhappy person accidentally does a lot of good, and the world is a little better at the end of the series than it was in the beginning. The stories take place in a few small towns, not New York City or Chicago or London.
My current WIP is a bit like that, although part of the story is the protagonist moving from one small world to another. She wants … well. Dagnija wants to do what is right. As the story progresses, that becomes helping provide for her family, and having children. If she can do those, she will be content. She doesn’t expect happiness, and she might be surprised by it if it comes. She works for a roof over her family’s heads, a satisfied husband, and healthy children. Dagnija wants a small world. She’s not out to change the world, because her world becomes so much better than what she’d ever imagined.
Small stories can be comfortable and satisfying. A problem is solved, someone gets a happy ending, the world is a little better. You don’t always have to save the empire, or defeat a monster dragon, or explore the entire galaxy in a story. Sometimes just living a good life, weathering a storm, and doing a little good is sufficient for a successful story or book. A nice pot of tea with tasty sandwiches and a small sweet might be exactly what your reader wants.
Mad Genius Club 
4 responses to “Writing in a Small World”
Working in this sort of vein always seems to me like trying to produce miniatures. Think of someone who knits (like me), used to architecture diagrams and presence, trying to make doll clothes (never me) with delicate, precise, hardly noticed changes of direction with material that is hard to focus on with tiny tools and easily smudged.
It’s not that I don’t admire the work of delicacy and small scale — it’s that my fingers and brain are far more comfortable with something I can build more robustly. The whole concept of 4-act structure shrinks to invisibility in a haiku.
I appreciate the effect, but I can only produce it as a technical exercise, and I can’t consume much of it without wanting to get more food into the house.
As a traditional Scandie fiddler, I see a similarity in the relationship between fiddle tunes for dancing, which are built like conventional A part/B part tunes and can be quite robust, and Norwegian hardingfele tunes (also for dancing). The hardingfele has a shorter neck (so finger placement needs to be more precise), everything about it is more delicate, the rhythmic structures are both exotic and subtle, most notes are double stopped (multiple strings bowed simultaneously), and there may be several parts of varying and unpredictable lengths. And yet, the same dancers appreciate both styles as equally satisfying, despite the substantial differences in styles and approach for the musicians.
(To no one’s surprise but my own, I had to give up on playing hardingfele, since I couldn’t do it delicately enough. I could learn the music and hear the effects, but I couldn’t produce them myself.)
The inventor (or near-inventor) of this “small world” approach in the English novel had something similar to say to your first paragraph. Over her own craft, she said: “The little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush as produces little effect after much labor.“
I’ve done a short or two like that, though they are closer to Cozy mysteries… One of my series heros is a cop. Not all the cases are big, world shattering cases, some are just regional or local problems. Often important, at least to the locals involved (the attempted arson of a meat packing plant for example) but not “stuff that appears in the President’s morning briefing.” I find that Shorts are more appropriate (for me) for this setting, and novels are situations that may wind up before SCOTUS some day, or that the president gets informed of.
Jessamyn’s Yarn by Frances deChantal is a lovely example of one of these smaller worlds in a novel. The problems are personal and local.