This page represents one of the only pages in the Little Women script that is truly just fictionalized by me. The scene has its basis in research, but the language is generated by me. Almost everything from the movie is either directly verbatim from the novel or from something else Louisa May Alcott wrote—a letter or a journal or another book.

This discussion I’m having Amy and Jo have is, in some ways, my thesis. Or at least part of my thesis. Initially I was worried it was going to be too on the nose, this discussion of writing, but it seems to be something that people fold into the emotional arc of the story, that it doesn’t stand out in blinking lights, like, HERE IS WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT. In any case, this discussion of the subject of fiction as either conferring importance or reflecting it, is at the heart of my understanding of the book. It is one of the reasons this book is the book that so many female authors and creators point back to and say, “That is my book; Jo March is my girl.”

I am in agreement with Amy here, not Jo—I believe that writing about something makes it important. I think Louisa May Alcott, whether she knew it or not, made the ordinary lives of girls and women extraordinary by turning her pen to them. I still think we very much have a hierarchy of stories. I think that the top of the hierarchy is male violence—man on man, man on woman, etc. I think if you look at the books and films and stories that we consider to be “important,” that is a common theme, either explicitly or implicitly.

The line “It’s just about our little life” is taken from correspondence that Louisa May Alcott had about the book. She truly wasn’t sure it was very good or very worthy, and she dismissed it when questioned about it as “moral pap for the young.” Writers aren’t always the most reliable judge of what they’ve done. In fact, in my experience, and in the experience of a lot of other writers I’ve spoken to, it’s often the pieces of writing that seem most embarrassing and unpromising that are the ones that really connect.

The very last two lines, about Amy being wise, aren’t directly from the book, but they are an extrapolation of one of my favorite lines of Amy’s—she says, “I don’t pretend to be wise, but I am observant.” That was one of the lines that I underlined and put little stars and exclamation points around because it was another key to the puzzle of Amy. She has always been seen as such a bratty character, with no depth or backbone, and yet when I revisited the book, I found her to be amazingly insightful and compelling. I wanted her to deliver some knowledge to Jo—sometimes creators don’t know what they create, and it is essential to have someone else reflect it back to you. And then of course Amy’s response to Jo, “You were just too busy noticing my faults,” is me in conversation with the 150-year-old audience of Little Women. It’s me—Greta, the author—saying, “WE MISSED HER! SHE WAS WISE ALL ALONG!”

In some ways this entire scene is that—a four-way conversation between me, the modern screenwriter, Louisa May Alcott, the characters of the book, and the audience as it spans across time and space. And I’m saying, it matters what we write. It matters what we make films about. I can because Louisa May Alcott did.

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