1 / 10 Katherine Heiny

This author, aside from being a badass storyteller, has a career with two valuable lessons for today’s writer. The first comes when we learn her story, “How to Give the Wrong Impression,” was rejected 31 times before, at the age of 25, she submitted it to The New Yorker -- and it was published. While this seems to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/02/books/katherine-heinys-road-to-single-carefree-mellow.html?_r=1">foretell literary greatness</a>, Heiny went generally unpublished for the next decade or so, writing YA novels under a pen name until the recent release of <em>Single, Carefree, Mellow</em>, a collection of short stories that includes the one that first put her name on the map. Heiny was 47 when Knopf published the collection. (And that’s the second lesson -- there’s no expiration date for your first book, so long as you keep trying.)

Knopf