Sure, so we both come out of television. Henry you may have heard…
I’m still in it.
That’s right, that’s right. Would you like to say anything specifically about that?
No. I’m just staking a claim.
Okay. He is an actor, and I’ve spent a lot of years at Universal Studios and at various other studios as a writer/producer mostly on situation comedies, a showrunner. So as a showrunner, you run the writing room so you sit in the middle of the night with some really gelatinous Chinese food and seven or eight or ten other writers and you create the show and you punch up the show and you listen to ideas.
So it’s a very particular kind of collaboration, you have to learn how to hear ideas, how to process ideas and not judge ideas. So I think having come out of that we both have that experience so we can say something that you create a safe place in the room to collaborate and you can say whatever comes into your mind and know that it’s, even if it’s a rotten idea no one is going to make fun of you and, and that the whole is greater than the, than the individual parts.
So our collaboration produces something better than either one of us would be doing alone.
For a lot of people, writing is solitary. I’m not great at that, I am grateful do you know, Lin also has this organization, you know the…
SCBWI.
There you go. And there are people in the office and I get to visit and I bring them cake and there’s now a puppy in the office and you know so it’s a wonderful environment and very, very successful for us.
I also think the kind of material we do, we write comedy and humor and entertainment. So it’s not a miserable process, we’re not looking to sort of engage in misery as some other kind of novelists might.
I leave that at the door.
He leaves his misery at the door, we have a sign over the door. And so you know it’s a very joyful process what we do, so it’s nice to do it together. I also write on my own, also not a miserable process. But when Henry is acting then I’m writing other things and when we’re together we’re collaborating on the work that we do together and it makes it really fun, it makes it go faster for both of us who have a little attention issue. It helps focus your attention.