For Erica Jong, No Fear of Diving Into Soaps : Television: The novelist-poet teams up with Emmy and Peabody Award-winning Linda Yellen for Aaron Spelling’s company and ABC.

It should come as no surprise that Aaron Spelling Productions is making its first foray into daytime soap opera, with a proposed serial for ABC called “The Women’s Group.” The company’s prime-time soap “Dynasty,” after all, was the top-rated series of the 1984-85 season, and Spelling himself co-produced the recently released Paramount film “Soapdish,” a sendup of the soaps.

What is notable, though, is the two-woman team who created and will produce the soap if ABC decides to go ahead with it: producer-writer-director Linda Yellen, who has won Emmy and Peabody awards for such television films as “Playing for Time,” “Second Serve: The Renee Richards Story” and “Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number,” and novelist-poet Erica Jong, whose uninhibited 1973 novel “Fear of Flying” revolutionized popular conceptions about women’s sexuality.

Actually, it is precisely that sort of track record that makes the pair prime candidates for the soap world, according to Yellen.

“For Erica and me individually, the books have done well and the films have done well. They’ve been centered around strong female protagonists, not in classically hyped-up situations, but real women coping with problems in today’s world,” she said in a phone interview. “So we decided to team up and give that to the TV soap audience, showing women dealing intelligently with modern-day problems.”

“The Women’s Group,” Jong said, proposes to follow the lives of seven women who are members of a self-help group, ranging in age from teens to the 50s. It would mix pain, passion and humor, she said, and would present women “talking to each other in a way you don’t see them doing on television.”

“I wanted to create a premise that was very durable that could go for years and would provide a large enough, elastic enough framework so we could show women’s lives within it,” Jong said in explaining her attraction to the daytime soap genre.

Yellen said they expect to turn in the “bible” for the show’s stories at the end of the month. Then it will be up to ABC to decide whether to put the show into production and find a place for it on the schedule.

Yellen said that she had been an admirer of Jong long before their partnership.

“Erica has this incredible sense of dealing with women’s problems with humor and touching-ness, where you say, ‘That’s me, that’s how I do it.’ She’s always been a risk-taker too--she’s in New Haven now, where there’s a play of her book, ‘Fanny.’ We’re both alumni of Barnard, which is how we first started talking, and as we got to know each other we found we had a great ability for collaboration.”

Yellen, whose introduction to the soap world came 10 years ago when her first feature, “Looking Up,” starred several soap performers, said that the daytime form appealed now because “the thrill of doing a soap is that it’s like doing an ensemble in theater. You’re creatively working in what you want to do, whereas so much of what the creative community does is selling. If you’re an actor, writer, producer used to a two-hour format, there are some stories that cannot be told in two hours. In soaps, you have characters who can grow and change.”

The pair chose as their focal point a women’s self-help group, which meets regularly to share problems, because it’s “a safe place where they can discuss their lives with outrageousness, fun, high spirits and support,” Jong said, adding that such groups are common across the country.

“Out of that comes the high- and the low-life,” Yellen said. “Erica is an historian of novels, and if you go back to the 19th Century, the novels have a very broad group of people who span the high-, low- and middle-life, whose lives intersect. (That happens) in a lot of Erica’s novels. So we’re going to show that happening in a realistic way.”

The serial, for which Jong will also serve as head writer if ABC decides to go forward with it, will be produced and set in New York, one of the few times that a soap has taken place in a real locale.

“It would be harder to have it be in Los Angeles, where everything is done by car, but in a city where everything is done by foot, it’s easier to show people working with people of different socioeconomic levels,” Yellen said. “This will take you everywhere in the five boroughs--and then some.”

Because the show is only in development, Yellen declined to reveal casting plans.

“There will be some surprises, serious people you wouldn’t have thought would be involved,” she said. “Given the kinds of things Erica and I have done and our ties with the creative community, we have the chance to bring in people behind the scenes and on camera who have not previously been associated with soaps.”