I’m a Jersey Girl who keeps trying to leave.....and keeps coming back. After growing up in the New Jersey suburb of Norwood, I went to journalism school at the University of Wisconsin and then moved to New York, where I wrote short stories and waitressed at a long-defunct pub called Peggy Doyle’s, the model for Declan McGlynn’s bar in The Man I Should Have Married..

Yada yada yada (yes, I’m yadaing lots of sex, plus a few extremely unglamorous journalism jobs), I became shoe and lingerie editor of Glamour magazine. I had no idea what I was doing, but figured this was a move that would help me become a professional writer. During my six years at Glamour, I married Dick Satran, long an editor at Reuters who is now producing a business news site for Fiedelity, and had my first child, my daughter Rory, who lives in Paris and is an editor of Self Service Magazine.

When Linda and I sold our first baby-naming book in 1987, I had enough money to leave Glamour and start freelancing. The flexibility of working at home made it possible for me to have two more children – my sons Joe and Owen are now 17 and 13 – and to move to both London and California for my husband’s career.

It was in California that I began seriously to write fiction again, laboring on the book that was to become The Man. I took a class with the lovely Ann Packer, joined a writing group, and then was lucky enough to enroll in Elizabeth George’s fabulous fiction-writing seminar, where I finally learned to write a novel.

Our family has been resettled in Montclair, New Jersey, where we’ve lived on and off for 20 years, since 2000, in a big green wreck of a house that we’ve made slightly less of a wreck. Our house is currently starring in its own TV commercial, which you can see here. I just want to be clear that most of that is not my furniture, except the black chair on which "Grandma" is sitting.

A few years ago I started a group called Montclair Editors & Writers, which has nearly 700 members. Every Friday, I meet with my novelists’ group, Alice Elliott Dark, Christina Baker Kline, and Benilde Little. Occasionally, I teach a class called “How To Write A Novel.”

But mostly, when I’m not with my family, and even sometimes when I am, I write. I try to write fiction in the morning, and then work on magazine articles or name books or other non-fiction writing in the afternoon. I am one of those people who gets antsy on Christmas and on vacation or whenever I’m not writing; I need it as much as I need chocolate. More.

How did you get to where you are now?

Linda Rosenkrantz and I just came out with our tenth baby-name book. This has been a consistent bread-and-butter part of my career, but it’s also a passion of mine. We also built this big baby-naming website called nameberry.com.

Old school publishers
Linda and I are in the unique position of owning all our own content because we started writing our name books so long ago that nobody knew what digital content was. The publisher was just like, “Oh, okay. You can have that.” Obviously, no authors get that in their contracts anymore, but because we have been publishing all along with St. Martin’s Press, our contracts have all given us those rights.

Learning the craft
I’d written short stories since college and so I kind of understood how to do that. But short stories are a very narrow world and one that doesn’t pay any real money. So I knew I needed to write a novel, and that’s a whole different thing.

I took a class with Elizabeth George out of the store called the Book Passage in Northern California. She was the first teacher I’d ever had who taught novel writing as a process.

Every fiction writing class I’d had before that was like a workshop. You’d bring in your story or the chapter and everyone would sit around and say what they liked and didn’t like. But I had never before heard anybody say, “Here’s how to write a novel. Step one, do this. Step two, do this. And here’s how you do it.”

That really spoke to me. I needed instruction and technique and that’s what Elizabeth George offered. She had a whole process and she has a book called Write Away. I haven’t read that book, but it kind of covers the same things as she taught in that class.

I had been struggling over a novel for three years at that point, and I went home from the class and threw the whole thing away and started from scratch and a year later sold that novel.

I think different writers have different issues, but for me I really needed instruction on how to do it. How much of an idea do you need to get started? You know, her belief was that, you know, you can have a very sketchy idea and the first thing you do is create your characters. The second thing you do is create your settings and all the way through to, you know, the very final step would be to create a plot.

As a journalist or even as a short story writer you don’t hear a lot about scene construction, but a novel is basically a series of causally related scenes. Learning how to write an effective scene and how to string scenes together so that they add up to a dramatically effective story in a novel is key to writing a novel that’s going to sell and that people are going to want to read.

I also took a writing class with Linda Berry. I’ve been a fan of hers for years and I had read a story about her in The New York Times that said she was teaching these classes. 

Her technique was totally unlike Elizabeth George’s and totally unlike anything I had done. Instead of being a big planner, Linda Berry was totally instinctual and thought you shouldn’t plan or think ahead, you should just be in the moment. And she was very much about constructing a scene in a very visually based way. It was exciting for me to tap into a new way to imagine material.

Finding an agent
Now I have two agents: one who handles my fiction and another who handles the baby naming books. The ideal is to have an agent who knows more about the area you’re writing because they’ll know the editors who buy that kind of work.

This is not an original idea, but it’s an effective one: Go to the bookstore or in your own bookshelves and look at the books that you really love that you would love your own novel or your own work to be like and read the acknowledgments and see who that author thanks as their agent.

A lot of authors have websites that tell who their agents are. There’s also a site called Publishers Marketplace that, for $20 a month, will send you a daily email with all the book deals that have been made, their agent was and editor, and how much money in general the author received. The "Who Represents" part of their site lists writers and their agents.  

A lot of agents choose the books they represent based on what they love, especially with fiction because fiction is still bought and sold more on passion than on any kind of intellectualized marketing decision.

So look for an agent who loves the kind of book that you’re writing. If you’re writing domestic romance, you probably don’t want to pitch the agent who sold The DaVinci Code.

How Not to Act Old
My book How Not To Act Old started as a blog. I pitched the idea to a couple of magazines as a story and nobody even wrote me back. So I decided, "Okay, I’m just going to do this by myself. It will be opportunity to learn about WordPress and I’ll have some fun, and if I don't like it or I run out of steam in a week, so what?"

New creative freedom
And, in fact, I love doing it. It was a great learning experience, and I found this new sort of creative freedom in producing this blog and doing the pictures and the layout and finding videos. And I loved not having an editor, frankly. I loved not having a gatekeeper.

Professional writers are used to going through a lot of layers of people that they have to please, yet the only one I had to please was myself. I found that very liberating and exciting and really felt in touch with my own voice and my own funniness.

A lot of people started to discover it and my agent liked it, and I ended up selling it as a book pretty quickly. That was extremely satisfying, because I did the blog to please myself but it very quickly found a wider acceptance in the world.

Hip tips from the pros
My kids have given me a lot of ideas. My oldest child is 26 and lives in Paris and works as a  magazine editor. My second child is 20 and a junior at Yale. And my youngest is 16 and a junior in high school. He's the one who came up with the cover idea for the book. I thought that was pretty brilliant.

I think when they really want to be nice to me they slip me a new idea about how not to act old. For instance, they'll say, “Alright, listen. You can’t drink vodka.” And when I ask why not they tell me, “Vodka’s really passé. Gin is the drink now." It’s all this kind of convoluted stuff to do with style and coolness and trendiness that isn’t being covered by The New York Times or Vogue. It's at a much more elemental level.

How do you see yourself differently now than you did 10 years ago?

In the past ten years, I went from having a mom career to having a really serious career.

Ten years ago, all three of my kids were at home. I had a six-year-old, a ten-year-old and a 16-year-old. I worked a limited number of hours a day, and those hours had to be for things that made money. I had a big magazine career and I did online stuff, too, but for established sites.

Now, my career is much more self directed. I’m coming up with big projects and then working to sell them. Some of that is by necessity. The world is leaner than it was before, and there aren’t a lot of magazines and websites with big fat open checkbooks the way there used to be.

But, for the most part, I would say that that has been very positive for me and my life.

Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

Ten years from now, I guess I would love to be a combination of Alice Munro and David Sedaris. That’s my wildest dream: to be a really brilliant literary fiction writer who’s a world-class humorist. But that’s my totally wild, crazy, if-I-knew-I-was-going-to-die-tomorrow dream.

I’m looking forward to having a more relaxed life with less financial pressures, more time with my husband and friends and more freedom to write exactly what I want to write, when I want to write it.