Lady Business: Jane the Virgin, Toni Morrison, and finding the space to write

Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the seventy-seventh issue, published August 8, 2019. 
 

Women's Work

 
Hello, and welcome to all my new readers. Thank you for signing up! It has been a pretty sad week, hasn’t it? Not coincidentally, it’s also been one of those weeks where I’m mostly off Twitter, partly due to fatigue with the discourse about whether racism is racism.
 
And partly due to looming deadlines. August is a weird time of year for me, because of how my magazine’s schedule works: I’m finding myself in the throes of a lot of urgent projects at the same time that many of the people I need to talk to for those projects are on vacation. (Some for very European definitions of “vacation”; I got an auto-response from a CEO yesterday claiming she’s unreachable for the next three weeks. Which sounds delightful … if maybe a little unrealistic for a CEO?)
 
It’s all a little envy-inducing -- especially this week, when I found myself staying up until 2 am on Tuesday to finish a big writing project. That’s a boast, not a complaint: It’s exhilarating to find myself so deep into writing a story that I don’t notice the time pass; when the words and the structure I’ve been agonizing about for days or weeks suddenly become obvious; when the needs for food or sleep or showering or checking my phone all fade into so much background noise.
 
Which brings me to a distraction that has brought me joy this summer: The funny, romantic, smart, and incredibly satisfying conclusion to Jane the Virgin, one of the smartest television shows ever about what it’s like to be a writer:
 

 
Jennie Snyder Urman’s sly romantic comedy about three generations of Latina women has rightly drawn all sorts of praise: For its terrific balance between melodramatic plotlines and grounded emotional stories; for its funny, flawed, fully-realized and extremely likable characters (especially its women, but also some wonderfully non-toxic men); for telling a very specific story about undocumented immigrants, and the American families and communities they create; for its unabashed embrace of romance; for its silliness (Brooke Shields plays “River Fields”!) For its beautifully saturated color palette. For its razor-sharp editing. For its ending.
 
But there’s one other thing that Jane the Virgin always quietly excelled at: Dramatizing the process and insecurity and discipline and work that is writing anything creative – especially when that work has to be balanced with a day job, and family obligations. 
 
Writing is not terribly interesting to dramatize! It’s a lot of watching someone sit at a laptop and type! But making space and time for the work is one of the biggest problems for many writers, especially women, especially when they’re not wealthy and need to spend most of their time on other, more lucrative things. And I always admired how Jane the Virgin regularly showed its titular working-class heroine struggling not only with the creative challenges but also the sheer logistics of being a writer.
 
The series made a point of showing Jane blocking out time on her calendar to write, and arranging childcare for times when she could shut the door to her kid and her boyfriend and her mother and grandmother, and sit alone in a room with her work. It showed the toll of that work being interrupted, or pre-empted. And it showed the incremental payoff of that work, in a series of triumphs and setbacks on the way to Jane’s exuberantly happy ending.
 
That was another great thing about Jane the Virgin, and how seriously it took its heroine’s writing: The series prioritized her professional goals and ambitions as much as her romantic adventures, and it tied her efforts to become a writer to her romance. Sure, the series finale was more than a little over the top: Jane gets married to her soul mate AND lands a $500,000 book deal! But however exaggerated that payoff, it was demonstrably earned by all the work that came before – and thus deeply satisfying.
 

Lady Bits

 
--“If it arrives you know. If you know it really has come, then you have to put it down.” Speaking of women writing “in stolen moments between a day job as a book editor and a life as the single mother of two young sons,” RIP Toni Morrison.
 
--“Mr. Diesel, 52, has his younger sister, a producer on the films, police the number of punches he takes.” Hard-hitting data-based reporting on the Fast & Furious franchise might be my favorite micro-genre of business journalism. (See also.)
 
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