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Sully: Were you Superman fans before writing for “Smallville“?

Cherie: I wasn’t, really. I wasn’t much of a comic book fan, but I have an older brother who is Mr. Comic Book and Mr. Science Fiction, and the great irony was when we got the job on “Smallville,” I said, “Steve, I’m getting paid to write that which you know so much better than I do.” But I certainly came to learn a lot. And also, “Smallville” is really grounded in real emotions and real stories of teenagers.

Jeff: I wasn’t a comics guy when I was younger, although I clearly read Superman comics when I was a kid.

Cherie: [The characters] are archetypes, and we did our homework. Once we knew we had the job, we spent many hours and days doing our homework so that when we went to work on the show we knew what we were writing about.

Jeff: The trickiest thing about writing these books is that we’re writing, in many cases, well before some things are going to air on television. And during the process of a season, some things in the writers’ room that you anticipate are going to happen in episode 10, but when you finally get to [episode 10], those things don’t happen and you’ve gone in a different direction, usually for some good reasons. [For example], a character gets really popular.

Cherie: We [also] wrote the “Dawson’s Creek” novels, and the job is the same when you’re writing novels of things that are on TV, which is you know approximately when the books is going to come out, and your job is to loosely make sure, even though you’re telling a stand-alone story, that nothing in that story contradicts any truth that’s going on, on television during that time. For example if you’re going to do a television tie-in and they kill the character off in October, [while] you’re writing the book six months before that and you didn’t know it. So they tell us usually in general what’s going in the show and if any big things are going to happen. And we get tapes of the show ahead of time.

Jeff: And we read scripts too, but in some ways that’s still not enough time. We’re writing many months ahead of publication. That’s just the book-publishing cycle. I mean, “Flight” just came out; and we were writing “Flight” during the early summer, if I’m not mistaken.

Cherie: It is about six months for paperback fiction. And sometimes you have to try to go in and catch something right before it gets printed. They’ll decide one day, “What are we going to do with Whitney? Are we going to send him to the Army? Are we going to kill him off? Are we going to have him lost in the jungle?” And a decision is made, you write accordingly, and then they decide to do something else completely, which makes your story look ridiculous.

Jeff: That doesn’t happen with us though!

Cherie: We almost got caught with Whitney.

Jeff: You get several shots at the material. You send in your manuscript and it’ll come back with editorial comments, and then you can make some changes on that. And then, page proofs come back from the publisher, and you can make changes on that. So, we really have a few months.

Sully: So after you’ve finished your completed draft, how many times are you able to get it back and make corrections?

Jeff: With this sort of pop-television fiction, I think we get two more shots at it.

Cherie: In the case of this series, the editor at Little, Brown, and then also at DC Comics, by the way who are the best people in the world to work for.… They give us notes, and then we get to do a polish, then page proofs where it’s actually typeset, and we get to see if there’s anything wrong.

Jeff: We may even get another shot at it. We get a copy-edited manuscript back, too. Depending on the time length.

Sully: It seems like a pretty extensive process.

Jeff: Compared to hardcover fiction writing, this is nothing!

Cherie: [With hardcover fiction], it’s many, many, many passes.

Sully: So talking more about the writing process, what’s the process that you two [go through] as a team? What are your strengths and weaknesses? How do you work together?

Cherie: I would say Jeff’s strength is probably plotting and ideas, and my strength is probably character and dialogue. What we do, and we learned to do this in the writers’ room and now apply it just to all our writing, to card beats on index cards and put them up on the bulletin board, so that we can move them around. We break down the whole piece that way. And then we trade off chapters and edit each other’s chapter.

Jeff: And then sometimes within chapters, there’ll be an action sequence, which I’ll write inside of Cherie’s chapter. And there will be a big emotional Clark/Lana conversation, which Cherie will write within mine. [Sometimes] I’ll write one, I’ll give it to Cherie. She doesn’t mark it up. She’ll put it up on her computer and rewrite it. And I’ll do the same to hers. … And then by the time we write, swap and rewrite, it’s utterly seamless. We don’t even remember who wrote what.

Cherie: I’ll say, “Oh, I love what you wrote here,” and he’ll say, “No, wait, I think you wrote that!” [Laughter.]

Sully: You two seem a lot like when Craig and I wrote together. [Psst: Check out “Lois & Clark: The Unaired Fifth Season” for some of Sully/Kat and Craig’s collaborative work from 1997. Shameless plug. Ha.]

Cherie: It is truly a blessing. So if you write that well with him, stick with it because so many people often ask us about that, they say, “How can you be married to each other, have a personal relationship and a professional relationship?” … For us it works really great. When you can find someone that you can do that with, it’s an amazing blessing.

Sully: You make the writing seamless.

Jeff: We better be able to make it seamless! If Al [Gough] and Miles [Millar] can do that with their scripts, we should be able to do it with our novels.

Sully: What do you like best about writing the “Smallville” characters?

Cherie: I have really come to love those characters, and … to have the opportunity to write for Superman as a teenager, I mean, who wouldn’t want to have the chance to do that? And the mythos of Clark and Lex, I think that’s one of the things that fascinates both of us the most, [since] the beginning. That you know what becomes of these two people, and you know that they are going to wrestle with ultimate good and ultimate evil, and here you have both of them, possibly on the cusp of becoming something else, and how they influence each other. And those themes are so big, having a chance to work with those archetypal characters and those kinds of themes [are] really exciting.

Jeff: For me I think it’s just different from other stuff we’ve written. We’ve tended to write fairly grounded fiction in the past, without a guy who can turn an M-16 into a pretzel. And it’s kind of fun to be able to write for a guy who can turn an M-16 into a pretzel!

Sully: Which characters were you most like as high school kids?

Cherie: Chloe! Chloe, of course! She’s a writer, and she’s funny. I look at Lana, and I think they have, to the credit of the show and the actress, come quite far with [her]. In the writers’ room, there were only two women, and a lot of guys -- we’re talking a lot of testosterone in that room. And [Kristin Kreuk] came in early on and met all of us. And she is loveliest, sweetest, most down-to-earth person. And she is stunningly beautiful, and then she left the writers’ room. Doris [Egan], the other female writer, and I are watching male eyes just slumping all over the room. [The male writers] had a hard time conceiving her as something other than someone you’d put on a pedestal because her beauty got in the way. But I think that the actress really wanted to develop her character, as did everybody else, and everybody, to their credit, got beyond that. And she really had a chance to show some dimension.

Sully: What about you, Jeff? Who were you most like in high school?

Jeff: I was like Jeremy Creek in high school. In his electric phase! [Laughter.] I was like Jonathan Kent. It’s hilarious. He’s jeans, T-shirt, flannel shirt. Most of the time with boots on.

Sully: In high school?

Jeff: Kinda right now, too!

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