They leave off at the same place they started, and they taste sweet. I found the corporate atmosphere suffocating, creatively, morally and otherwise. By January, I was waiting tables, and happier for it. In September, I was back in school, in an M.A. fiction writing program at Illinois State University, doing the kind of writing I wanted to be doing, and teaching writing. Grad school is really too close for me to biographize, but I think I can say a few things I've learned about writing over the past few years.
Writing is a recursive process.
With fiction especially, writing is never done. A story is a thing that you need to come back to, over and over, and often to find that you are failing. The trick is to be recursive, to keep coming back, time and time and time again. I think that I've learned something about patience and writing, about learning my limits, and about setting reasonable goals. I think I've also learned that one of the best ways to learn about writing is to teach other people writing.