Success is a fleeting, insubstantial thing. At the recent, excellent, VWC Get Writing 2010 conference, one of the speakers quoted a saying that is worth repeating here: 'A successful writer is only a failed writer who did not give up.' Success, however, is an impostor, like Triumph and Disaster in Kipling's If, and yet we writers still labour in search of that spectral destination, sometimes to the detriment of health and relationships.
Perhaps, then, success should be regarded not so much as a destination but a journey? Framed in those terms, as R L Stephenson wrote, it may be '...better to travel hopefully than to arrive'. Indeed, the key to success may reside in something seemingly transient and painful but in truth substantial and positive, like receiving better rejections.
