Why the stubbornness? What exactly drives you? What joys have it brought? What it made you materialize? Screams? Tears? Fragments? Exposed out there in the most vulgar fragility in exchange for constrained coldness? Why persist if you’re not good? Repeat with me slowly: I – am – not – good. Your style lacks charm, your ideas are colorless, and to make matters worse, you haven’t finished a single story to date — neither small nor large, neither good nor mediocre nor terrible, nothing with a beginning, middle, end, and done, like those shared on pub tables fueled by ethanol and snacks, and that you, with all your sacrifice, can’t put on paper, no matter how much you force and squeeze, nothing, nothing, just fragments. Always bad, by the way. What is the coherence of an addiction without ecstasy or escape? An addiction that doesn’t control you and you try to control, you’re crazy but not unaware of this discrepancy, you can’t help but consider why you don’t just give in. Dude, be happy. Life without ambition is so beautiful. At least more poetic than your aspirations. Be a monk. Or try the purity of the animal side. God, perhaps. Anything but this prison, this I-want-to-write-but-can’t or I-have-a-dream-but-I’m-too-bad-for-it or even the-universe-is-unfair-I-was-born-so-shitty-while-others-are-so-awesome-why-am-I-not-a-Chimamanda-of-life-for-example-? or the emptiness of the white screen occasionally filled with beautiful words insisting on not connecting in the least syntactic way, let alone literary, the continuous disillusionment of the loneliness of not being able to pursue your own dream, or share your anxieties, much less give vent to what you feel is most representative within you. You have a theory: your critical sense swelled too quickly and crushed the creative. Shouldn’t you therefore accept your role and be a critic? It’s not an inferior function, absolutely not, don’t come with presumptuous talk. All occupations are dignified, and to propose otherwise is hideous. Refusing to assume your place is a sign of arrogance and folly, and from what you’ve already learned, you know that arrogance and folly, combined with mediocrity and stubbornness, usually lead to the most wretched endings. The room in the early morning is the materialization of your anguish, repetitive and stifling, musty in smell and in the cracked and peeling blue walls, dysfunctional in the smallest aspects, stuffed with bags, papers in various states, insects, pictures hung with love and looked at with disillusionment, McEwan, Morrison, Tartt, Wallace, Heti, Franzen, DeWitt, Atwood, and Whitehead, reassuringly anglophone but still contemporary, looking at their respective cameras and having no choice but to observe you, some ironic, others serious, all geniuses. You sustain the gaze and ask: “Dear sirs, with all due respect, were you also alone?” Whitehead shows amusement. Tartt is somewhat elitist. McEwan seems amazed with himself. “Did anyone take the initiative to enliven you? Has art ever been imprisoned within you? Was the liberation process something for someone else?” Only Wallace empathizes. “Why don’t we have a Nobel winner in this country?” McEwan continues to be amazed. “Is it a Brazilian or Swedish issue? Far from victimizing myself, but not only was I born in this hole, but I also have no talent whatsoever. The situation is very serious. Does anyone out there read Lygia?” Now you lose patience and bury your head in what remains of the pillow. These arrogant ones won’t listen to you. And if you shout? Sometimes you dream of dreaming of singing to be able to impose your art on the vibrations of molecules as balls and churches do. But oh, what unbearable and irreducible subjectivity yours is, fixated on sequences of printed sentences. How to force someone to read anything? Especially what wasn’t created? You envy Laís, role model sister, screaming for eight years at the oldest singing school in the country. This is ea—, School. The word, naturally repulsive, mocks you. It brings the stark. Solitude Need Search Acceptance Teaching Writing Exercises Experience Improvement Yaw. The terms fall fast, freely associated, agglomerating into non-verbal sentences. Hidden place Solution for art Time for everything. The story emerges complete before being written, primordial, clear in your two futures. Shapeless. Perfect for fiction. Then life comes.