Imagining Microcosms

Think Small and Make Your Story Bigger

Do you remember John Peterson’s book series The Littles? The first book (published by Scholastic in 1967) follows a family of tiny, tailed people who live secretly inside the walls of the Bigg family home and survive by creatively reusing small human items. When the Biggs leave for the summer, their messy renters let the house fill with trash, which draws mice. The mice terrify the Littles, so young Tom Little dresses up as a mouse and runs across the kitchen floor to alert the renters.

That seemed like a good idea… except it wasn’t.

The Biggs respond by bringing in a cat, and the cat turns out to be a worse problem than the mice. Tom survives it by taming the cat himself, on the theory that if big people can live alongside cats, so can little ones. By the time the Biggs return, order is restored.

When I read this in third grade, I was fascinated by the idea of other worlds. In a sense, John Peterson created an alternate universe. Or rather a secret one existing within ours, overlapping our lives the way an insect’s world does.

The Little family (Mr. and Mrs. Little, Tom, Lucy, Uncle Pete, and Granny Little) were only a few inches tall. They went completely unseen by the humans. The symbiosis existed only because the Little family set it up.

The rest almost writes itself from the premise. What kind of conflicts would tiny people in a big house run into? Mice, for a start. To someone three inches tall, a mouse is a monster. Clear the mice, and the cat brought in to hunt them becomes the next danger. That chain is predictable. Peterson’s way out of it is not. The obvious rescue would be a friendly dog running the cat off, the way a dog saves the mouse in Tom and Jerry. Peterson skips the dog and has the smallest character on the page befriend the biggest threat. The premise hands you the conflict. The choice about how it resolves is where the writing actually happens.