Hold onto your spandex — GLOW is back for a third season.

The Netflix dramedy, which is based on the real-life Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling league of the 1980s, brings together 14 women from different backgrounds and puts them in the ring. Of course, the show is about more than wrestling; it’s about the sisterhood that comes from that experience — for better and for worse. While the first season introduced viewers to the world of GLOW, the second season focused on exploring the characters.

In the hands of lesser-seasoned writers, characters belonging to a flashy wrestling league might come off as cheesy and/or one-dimensional. The characters from GLOW are anything but — they wrestle with identity, loneliness, loss, and love in a way that feels real and true. That’s because the show’s creators, Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch, wouldn’t have it any other way.

“We are always trying to create real, flawed people, [which] will inherently make them vulnerable,” Mensch, alongside Flahive, said in an interview with Final Draft.

The impulse to write the series came from feelings of exploitation and empowerment, “which is how we feel when we watch women’s wrestling,” she said.

According to both Mensch and Flahive, they try to incorporate both of those sentiments — as well as something real and something grounded as inspiration — when building characters.

“We are not trying to write superheroes, but we are trying to write people who aren’t perfect,” Mensch said.

The big reveal that Ruth (Alison Brie) slept with Debbie’s (Betty Gilpin) husband in season one proves that. When it comes to creating surprising moments like that, Mensch said the story must not be predictable.

“If a storyline has been done before or it seems like it’s going to be what you might think it will be, then we will twist it and see if we can find a more surprising version of it,” she said.

According to Mensch, the big surprises usually come when she and Flahive are breaking or re-breaking a story.

“We come in with all these great big ideas and then we have character shifts and story shifts. And then with the wrestling world, we end up having more emotion than first thought,” she said.

Making sure emotional layers are evident — particularly in a world that is built on artifice — is inherent in the writers’ process.

“We are people that don’t know how to write without emotion. If it’s mechanically a great story without an emotional, real character, we aren’t going to write that story,” Mensch said.

“If there’s nothing emotionally resonant, then it’s not the story for us. Emotions are always at the forefront of our stories, and if it’s not, then we stop and we question it.”

While the showrunners acknowledge other writers’ rooms might turn inward for stories and experiences, while writing GLOW, Mensch and Flahive rarely do.

“I think it’s one of those case-by-case scenarios,” Flahive said, citing motherhood as an example of a theme that was informed by the writers’ personal experiences.

“I feel like that story was very much felt and created from the groundwork of the room; I think that’s what made that story richer and more detailed and fully developed,” she said.

“But we aren’t a room that is looking for particular stories from writers to build on.”

Hitting emotional beats, getting information out, and being funny — all within 30 minutes — is a task the writers can tackle because of their extensive backgrounds in writing for various cable series (Weeds, Shameless, Nurse Jackie).

“I grew up writing for a 30-minute cable dramedy and so did Carly, so that’s just sort of how our brains work and how we’ve learned how to write TV,” Flahive said.

A background in theater and, in Mensch’s case, writing for Orange Is the New Black helped the writers learn how to write for an ensemble of women, too.

“Liz worked for Nurse Jackie so … she knows what it’s like to write a show in its entirety. I think we’ve learned a million different lessons from our different experiences with theater, but the key one being how to work with actors and be on set. There are so many lessons that have definitely shaped us as writers,” Mensch said.

The writers say the series often feels like a three-ring circus — “we’ve got emotions, we’ve got comedy, we’ve got plot, we’ve got wrestling” — which is why a big part of their job is knowing when to slow down and settle into a scene.

“Also knowing when we need to pick things back up,” Mensch said.

“It’s definitely about being as efficient as possible while also hearing the rhythm of your show and sorting out what makes it work.”

And though the ‘80s is a gloriously hyperbolic era ripe with pop culture references, both Mensch and Flahive say the time the show takes place in is not their priority while they write and create stories for it. While Flahive said heavy research helps the show feel authentic, when it comes to the writing, “We have a modern brain; we just happen to be writing an ‘80s show.”

Mensch agreed.

“Our show is about a bunch of women who happen to wrestle in the ‘80s. But it’s not about the ‘80s,” she said.