Good Writing: Subtle Hints?

In A Simple Soul by Gustave Flaubert there is a lot of description done through ornamental language and through small hints that actually reveal a lot about a certain character. I thought that it was amazing to see how he did this in a very subtle way and how at the end of the story we had a perfect image and characterization of each of the protagonists without ever sitting the reader down and listing characteristics specific to one person. A great example of this is the following passage: “Elle s'agita pour les souliers pour le chapelet, pour le livre, pour les gants.” Here Flaubert is putting a description of Felicite in the middle of an anecdote which gives us an idea of her personality and disposition (she worries a lot and about very unimportant things) without making it clear. At the end of the book I felt like I really knew that character, and the feeling of surprise that I felt as a reaction to this feeling was one that I would love to create in my readers. I think that a lot of this happens with the parrot, too. We are never told that she is a sad and miserable person, but that is very much the feeling I got when I noticed that the most important thing to her is a parrot, and it is the last thing she recalls and thinks about before she is about to die. This also presents us with the opportunity to understand just how lonely she really is and how important “silly” things are to her, and maybe even to all the lonely people out there. Although Flaubert is a very ornamented writer and his text can not be described as minimalistic, I felt that in this respect on making the reader catch on to complex things by adding simple touches made him a type of minimalist. However, as I wrote this I started to think that all writers include hints as such in their writing and that maybe the fact that you can make the reader realize things that maybe would have been ignored by others is the essence of being a good writer. Is there really one trait that is key to being a great author or is it many different aspects of writing combined? I have come to think that it is many many items combined, and I am still surprised that as we go on through the year I see things that I thought were meaningless actually have a very big importance and effect on the whole piece.