“If I had known how much fun [publishing a book] was going to be, I would have done it years ago.”
Katherine Heiny

Conventional wisdom about the path of a fiction writer can be stifling and discouraging. That’s why it’s heartening to learn about a debut author who turned it on its head and came out on top.

Katherine Heigy recently had her first book published by Knopf: Single. Carefree. Mellow is a short-story collection — a genre she was repeatedly told by pros at Columbia’s M.F.A. program was literally off limits to a first-time author. As Katherine put it: “The belief was that a novel was the first thing you publish.”

While waiting for a heavy weight novel idea to hit, concepts for short stories began bubbling up “faster than I could write them down,” she recalls. Instead of buying into the party line about novels, Katherine trusted her instincts and began developing her writing chops via short stories — a strategy that she found “really liberating.”

Her wry stories of relationships gone wrong struck a chord with magazine and literary journal editors. In one major coup, for example, the New Yorker accepted a story called “How to Give the Wrong Impression” the same day Katherine submitted it. Now that’s a quick turnaround!

But even as she created a stockpile of published stories over the years, it never occurred to her that she had the makings of a collection. But when pitching a new agent, she sent a selection of stories and the agent pitched the idea of a collection to her.

It didn’t hurt that by this time, Katherine finally had her idea for a novel. “When I stopped looking for it, it came to me,” she recalls. She started penning stories that were “way too long” and realized that she was actually creating the chapters of a novel. As she did with her stories, she followed her writing where it led her. Ultimately, her agent sold her short-story collection and novel together and at age 47, Katherine became a debut author.

What an inspiring story! It just shows to go you that you don’t have to follow the beaten path — you can carve out one of your own. Write on!