I read in Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human that, to be a writer, one has to "let a person make a hundred or more drafts of short stories, none longer than two pages, yet each of a clarity such that each word in it is necessary." At that time, I was in a state of excitement about reading Machado de Assis and Eça de Queiroz, so I decided to distribute these tasks assigned by Nietzsche among the seven days of the week, and, in fact, I produced some texts throughout six years. I even started a novel from one of the outlines within these pages, and, as promised in the opuscule Santa Maria D'Oeste, it may be developed in a thousand different ways, as long as this unpretending study on fiction is read by a thousand interested readers.
