The personalities in AWOW make it work. The wonderfully varied backgrounds and reasons for writing therefrom open up a treasure chest of techniques and inspiration; and they are great fun to know as well.
My particular fun is recreating bygone eras and their aftereffects. How did the Sputnik scare, flying in the Vietnam War, flying for Delta during the glamor years of the airlines, then trial lawyering come to land on a once pretty lawless street kid? AWOW has shown me how to write it so someone might care. Isn’t that the trick in writing?
This man was a commercial airline pilot before he became a New York Times Best Selling writer. I had the misfortune of flying on several flights he captained, and I can assure you everyone on board had underwear full of excrement by time we landed. He would cut through steep mountain passes and call them 'scenic tours,' play chicken with private aircraft, and put his commercial jetliner into stalls just to see how long it would take him to pull the aircraft out of a dive. Now, I think, he did all of that just to fill his head full of story ideas for when he became an author.