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Sully: And here’s the obligatory question for every Superman interview ever: If you could have any superpower, what would it be?

Cherie: To fly.

Jeff: Gosh, it would be so tempting to be a dork and say “super-breath.” Um, how about super-speed?

Cherie: What do most people say to that?

Sully: A lot of people say fly, and a lot of them say invisibility.

Cherie: The first thing that popped into my mind was invisibility, but having written it, and having written “Flight,” and I have never had a dream of being invisible, but I’ve had flying dreams since I was a little girl.

Sully: This question is for the relationship fans: Who do guys root for, Clark and Lana, or Clark and Chloe?

Cherie: Clark and Chloe. However, I’m an experienced enough writer to know that it shouldn’t happen. That’s a lot of the strength of the show -- in the conflict -- so that triangle has to exist. But I was very excited to see this year that they’re playing that triangle. Much more so than they were last year, which frankly, I pushed for!

Jeff: I agree with Cherie! It’s a good triangle. And those triangles, they just work for young audiences. They work for medium-aged audiences, and they work for old audiences. Everybody loves a good, formidable triangle, whether it’s a guy and two girls, or a girl and two guys.

Cherie: And Chloe, in the lingo of daytime writing, is a “place card character,” meaning she is a girl that girls relate to. They feel like they’re her in a scene. She is a really important character. Also, [she] has some similarities to Lois Lane. We know what happens when [Clark] grows up, and we know he doesn’t end up with Lana. She becomes the fantasy girl you love when you’re young, and a lot of men … they could remember a fantasy girl in their youth that they felt that way about.

Jeff: I think that Cherie makes a really good point, in the sense that since we know it’s going to be Clark and Lois ultimately, looking at Clark and Chloe now is something of a window into Clark and Lois then. Even though it’s Clark and Lana. It’s interesting to the audience in that way.

Sully: What other projects are you working on?

Jeff: We’ve got some really cool stuff. We have a novel coming out by Random House in late 2003. It’s called “A Heart Divided” that we wrote together. It’s a [hardcover] romance between a girl from the North and a guy from the South set against a Confederate flag controversy in a national high school. It’s going to be a very controversial book, and we’re very happy with where it is.

Sully: Is it geared toward young adults?

Jeff: Yes, it’s for teens.

Cherie: I just finished a new play, and I’m excited about that because I haven’t had a chance to write a play in awhile, and I’ve had many producers at many theaters say, “Cherie, write something with a small cast where the main character isn’t 16!” I wrote a three-character play where all the characters are adults, and in fact we’re going to the first reading of it.

Jeff: We’re doing a teen series for Little, Brown, which will start up in the fall of 2003. And we’re working on another hardcover project for Putnam. We’ve got a full plate.

Sully: So does this mean you’re not going to go back into television?

Jeff: One never knows. We really enjoyed it. I hope that at some point in the not-distant future I can get in up to my elbows again.

Cherie: We certainly are open to going back on another show. [Aaron] Spelling has a series of ours going on right now that they’re trying to develop for the WB, so in the best of all possible worlds, that would be the series that would be based on our own books.

Jeff: The books are called “Teen Angels.” We wrote six in a series for Avon Books back in the mid-1990s. Now Aaron Spelling has an option [for it], so keep your fingers crossed!

Sully: What kind of advice would you give aspiring writers and novelists, and what was the best professional advice you ever got?

Cherie: The best way to become a writer, this sounds really pat, but to read everything. Read absolutely everything, to be a voracious reader. Simply start writing. I wrote from the time I was little, and the only way you can learn to do it is to do it. And the best advice I ever got was that when you want to do something, especially something in the arts like writing, that there are a thousand people who’ll tell you, “Oh that’s almost impossible. Nobody makes their living that way.” And they will discourage you. I always say to kids, I can absolutely guarantee that if you’re discouraged before you try, then you will fail. The only possible hope you have of success is if you try. And when you look back on your life, you will not regret the things you tried and failed at. You will regret the things you wanted to try and didn’t try.

Jeff: Best professional writing advice I ever got was probably not given as writing advice. But it was something that has stuck with me forever. It is something Miles Millar said in the writers’ room on maybe our first day there. It was a three-word question: “What’s on ‘Roswell’?” What that has to do with is keeping your story moving, compelling, exciting, so that there’s never any reason for either your viewer or your audience or reader to switch from what you’re doing. One of the scary things and wonderful things about television is that you’ve got a gazillion channels out there, and your story grinds to a stop for a commercial four times, maybe five times during the course of an hour. And you always have to worry, “What’s on ‘Roswell’?” So, in anything that we’re writing about, whether it is books, plays, TV scripts, film scripts -- you’ve got to … keep it compelling enough so that if someone dares think what’s on “Roswell” they’re not going to change the channel, or put down the book and pick up another one. Or turn off what you’re doing and start up on something else.

Cherie: I think you should be very brave to be an artist. Brave and fearless. Not necessarily an artist in television, because that’s much more of a collaborative process. But if you’re a novelist or playwright, you’ve got to look into the deepest part of yourself to really write well.

Sullivan Lane gives special thanks to first and foremost to Cherie and Jeff, who were awesome to interview and spoke in turn, making it easy for me to transcribe; KryptoKoi; Chiriru; MollyTM (to whom Cherie says “thank you” for reading her column); Lightstar Angel; Tara LJC; Craig for giving her the opportunity to conduct this interview; all the cool people at KryptonSite message boards, Television Without Pity, and Live Journal who helped me think of questions; and the sales dude at Radio Shack in Serramonte Shopping Center who helped her pick out a tape recorder that connects to a telephone. That dude rocked.

Sullivan Lane can be reached by e-mail at katpicson@yahoo.com.

"Flight" can be ordered at Amazon.com by clicking here.

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