Recently, instead of calling the stakes in many of these stories "small", I've been calling them "personal". To quote from the "What grabs and keeps me" section of a blog post I wrote about choosing short sf/f to highlight on MetaFilter: will this craftsman find the materials he needs to make his masterpiece violin? will this careworker find a way to understand and connect with her patient? will this aunt successfully make the cake that she wants to serve as a gesture of reconciliation with her family?

Because these ARE big stakes to the point-of-view the story offers us to share.

There's a moment in the Wim Wenders movie Perfect Days where a person cleaning a public toilet notices a left-behind bit of paper, a note from a stranger. The specific way he reacted to it elicited an audible gasp from me and a similar reaction from my seatmate. It has nothing to do with death or saving the world or stakes like that -- nothing about this choice will be fatal, or make the news or the history books. It's just a choice having to do with human connection, and the suspense captivated me far more than a lot of action movie-type stakes do.