Jane writes Husbands with star Cheeks. “That has just continued to thrive because we have, well, not only did we write season two together and season one, obviously, but we also are writing these Husbands comics now.”
Their writers’ room is virtual—email. “Every week there's a piece of writing going through e-mail one direction or the other. And the way it seems to work really best is that we sort of take turns. He'll write the first draft of a scene or an issue of the comic book and I'll polish it. Or I will and send it to him and he'll polish it and then, you know, it bounces back and forth a couple times. But it's interesting that it doesn't seem to matter who starts it. We end up in a place that we both agree is sort of optimal, I think just because our styles are so similar.”
Although writing partnerships in television are pretty common, Jane usually writes solo. “I had never wanted to [write with a partner] because I feel like I'm so proprietary.” Although she has written with “ad hoc” partners from time to time, including, Doug Petrie on Buffy, and Drew Greenberg, with whom she recently wrote a new Buffy comic coming in a few weeks.
But this is a new sort of experience for her, where “the voices of these characters are going to belong to the two of us together. That was new for me. And I didn't think I would be able to do it. I thought I'd be too precious with my own words. But it actually turned out to be really, really good for me. It works really well to have someone there.” She explained that writing with a partner is “a very different thing because you have the courage of your convictions, but you also have someone to back you up and go, yes, your courage and your convictions are both in the right place.”
According to Jane, Cheeks is “the one with the vision.” She explained that he “has these nuanced points he wants to make about sort of, his community. And I help, you know, sort of give feedback on the way we are choosing together to say it. But very much, the points that he makes are very much his own and so that, I never feel like I'm putting words in someone's mouth. He's very smart and he has very reasoned opinions and I think the show does a good job of getting them across.”
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