Fragments...
Interviewer: Does a reader need to read all of your books to fully understand your work?
Marias: No, my books are linked in many aspects, but they are separate books. But I don't understand what is meant by being "fully understood." You don't write books to be understood, do you? That is not the reason for doing it.
(Source: The Paris Review, Art of Fiction No.190, Javier Marias)
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The only advice I can give is to read others, get what you can out of a book and make your own interpretation of what the author is saying.
Don't get hung up on critics and all that madness. Blend in your experiences, without writing facts, and use your creativity. Plan your stories and don't make rash decisions. Then, when it's finished, you're in your own stew...
(Source: Catching the "Catcher in the Rye" J.D.Salinger by Michael Clarkson from If You Really Want to Hear About It)
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Completion does not mean that everything has been told. Henry James, as he was coming to the end of writing one of his greatest novels, The Portrait of a Lady, confided to himself in his notebook his worry that his readers would think that the novel was not really finished, that he had "not seen the heroine to the end of her situation". (As you will remember, James leaves his heroine, the brilliant and idealistic Isabel Archer, resolved not to leave her husband, whom she has discovered to be a mercenary scoundrel, though there is a former suitor, the aptly named Caspar Goodwood, who, still in love with her, hopes she will change her mind.) But, James argued to himself, his novel would be rightly finished on this note. As he wrote: "The whole of anything is never told; you can only take what groups together. What I have done has that unity - it groups together. It is complete in itself."
(More such in the Susan Sontag Essay, Pay Attention to the World in the Guardian)
