GamePress Interviews Felicia Day on Her New Book: Embrace Your Weird

GamePress Interviews Felicia Day on Her New Book: Embrace Your Weird
  • We Interviewed Felicia Day on her new book, Embrace Your Weird: Face Your Fears and Unleash Creativity.

  • Embrace Your Weird is coming out October 1, 2019 and will be available everywhere books are sold and can be pre-ordered now. 

  • Book Tour tickets can be bought from feliciadaybook.com

Image of Embrace Your Weird and Felicia Day

The Inspiration Behind Embrace Your Weird

Felicia Day  

The book is called Embrace Your Weird: Face Your Fears and Unleash Creativity, and I was inspired to write it because I wrote a memoir a few years ago called, You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost): A Memoir. And everywhere I went, I met people who told me that the book inspired them to either start creating themselves, or get help for their anxiety and depression. And those two things were so impactful to me, that I just wanted to do more of it and I wanted to do it in a version that handed the keys to the reader a little bit more than just telling my personal story. 

So I set out to do sort of an interactive book. The book has a lot of study essays and writing around it, but it also has exercises for the reader to fill out while they read the book. So I wanted to kind of defuse the back and forth dialogue that I have online with the people who will be reading the book.

Harnessing Creativity

So the common creator struggle seems to be having too many works in progress and not being able to stick to one project long enough to finish it. As a creative entrepreneur, do you have any? Do you have the same issue, and how do you combat this?

Felicia Day

I 100% have this issue. A lot of the things in the book, if you read it, are all things that I've struggled with over the years. And finishing things is the most important thing that I've kind of come to the conclusion about creativity. The best thing about creativity is that it's spontaneous; we come up with ideas out of joy and enthusiasm, and the unfortunate part is when we get into the work of the creativity, we kind of lose a little bit of that steam when we get into the weeds of stuff. 

The underlying message of my book is that you have to embrace the work of creativity full force in order to get your creativity out in the world. The most you will learn from doing something creative is finishing things. Because it's only when you get it out and can see that piece of creativity with a bird's side that you really get the full impact of what you were trying to say. 

The full impact of education, of getting better at your creativity--unless you finish it, you don't know how to make it better. So I guess that's the biggest lesson for me as creator: seeing things through, being able to work on them and then step away and say, "Okay, that's the best I could do at the time.", and learning lessons from that piece of creativity that you can take in your future creative work.

I remember reading in chapter three, that it talks a lot about how difficult maintaining creativity from youth can be because of how suppressive our environments can be to kind of like, tamp down on that creativity. And I personally feel like that's only gotten stronger due to social media, like Instagram and Twitter that really magnify both praise and ridicule. What have you done for your own creativity now to block out those negative voices?

Felicia Day

The beautiful thing about social media is that we have so many more outlets for our creativity, we have so many different ways to express ourselves, and we can kind of go around gatekeepers to get our creativity to people in a new way. So those are awesome things, but like you said, the other side of that is that we are pretending to kind of live our lives in a very demonstrative way--kind of looking toward the end result of something versus experiencing it for ourselves or really creating because it's something we inside need to create, regardless of how it will be received. I talked about a lot of those issues in my book. 

That's why I kind of suggest when you're doing the book, stay as much as you can off of social media. And  later in the book, I kind of emphasize it: in order to be creative, you need to let your mind out to wander without filling it up constantly with tweets and sharing and looking at something with the sole goal of sharing it. You can actually absorb something like a sunset or a concert or an experience, and just let it sit inside you and affect you as a creator versus like in media where your sharing it without reflecting on why you enjoy it, or why you feel like this is a part of your world or worldview. 

So, you know, I think a lot of the book is me, after I had a baby, kind of piecing myself together, digging deep and trying to figure out who I am as a creator, 'what do I actually have to say?', 'What do I need to say outside of all these things that people are telling me to be?' And so, there's a lot of things in the book to deal with all these things that are pressuring us, especially in the world of social media.

One thing that I noticed about the book while reading was, it definitely seemed very very personal, and a lot of the creative exercises that you included were very emotional and were all about drawing those emotions out and about personal introspection, and why you encourage people to go through the book slowly, because of that. Were there any chapters that were especially difficult for you to write because of that introspection?

Felicia Day

I mean, yeah, I think that when you have a personal story attached to something, it makes it more actionable and more human. And so whenever I could, I would illustrate talking about anxiety or procrastination or anything, because I've been affected by all of these things. That's kind of my life's quest to overcome my own enemies inside to get my creativity out. And so we have all this stuff built up inside of us, and the more personal and emotional we can be in our approach to overcoming those barriers inside of us, the easier they fall. 

And so I guess, the most exciting part, for me, was talking about the things that really keep me back, especially the anxiety chapter talks a lot about different techniques that I've developed over the years to be able to deal with my very anxious character, and I had to have the analogy in there of a six-sided dice. 

[laughs] 

So there's like six techniques, each of which is going to be a side of a dice and I thought that was a really cool analogy and it made me excited to write about something that's very hard for me to deal with, which is constantly being anxious and be held back and inhibited by my body kind of going into panic mode when I'm either on a stage or in a judgmental situation. I, in working through the book, found a lot of things about my own character and my own self that I'm excited to work on and kind of tackle. 

In a way, we're constantly growing, we're constantly becoming different people as we age and move through life, and I think the trick is to, you know, allow ourselves to grow and become different, but never let go of the root of who we are. And sometimes they can become muddy and you have to just go back and start digging and excavating who you are to kind of clarify where you want to go in the future.

Future Creative Projects

You've dipped your toes into several creative wells from writing to acting, and of course, gaming; Are there any creative projects or mediums that you have not delved into yet but would like to?

Felicia Day

Yeah, you know, I really would love to write a fiction book, and I would love to direct something--I've always been just a producer and a writer, and I've directed some of my smaller web videos, but never the bigger narrative things. And I'd really like to dig my teeth into that, because I really feel like I've had a lot of experience around that, but never directing myself. So that's something that I'm looking into 2020 to do, too, because I want to be constantly growing as the creator as well. And even writing the book made me kind of want to expand my horizons and try different things, because you never know where a curiosity will take you. And that's what's kind of beautiful about creativity: if you allow yourself to open that door and try something you never thought you'd be interested in, it could be something that could transform your life.

If you have time for one last kind of fun question, if you could live in a world that was created by Jim Henson puppetry like Farscape, The Dark Crystal, or Labyrinth, which would you choose?

Felicia Day

Oh my gosh! I loved Fraggle Rock as a kid. I'd love to have those animals in my house. So,

[laughs] 

--can I just live with some Fraggles? That would be kind of amazing! Oh wait Doozer? Doozer that's it, Doozer. I wanted a Doozer my whole life.

[laughs]

Doozers from Fraggle Rock

Full Interview Transcript

Alrighty. So my first question is, of course, tell me a little bit about your new book and what inspired you to write it.

Felicia Day  

The book is called Embrace Your Weird: Face Your Fears and Unleash Creativity, and I was inspired to write it because I wrote a memoir a few years ago called, You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost). And everywhere I went, I met people who told me that the book inspired them to either start creating themselves, or get help for their anxiety and depression. And those two things were so impactful to me, that I just wanted to do more of it and I wanted to do it in a version that handed the keys to the reader a little bit more than just telling my personal story. So I set out to do sort of an interactive book. The book has a lot of study essays and writing around it, but it also has exercises for the reader to fill out while they read the book. So I wanted to kind of defuse the back and forth dialogue that I have online with the people who will be reading the book.

  

Absolutely, and I was able to look at a lot of those exercises. And they seemed really really helpful, especially with like jumpstarting the actual process of creating. So the common creator struggle seems to be having too many works in progress and not being able to stick to one project long enough to finish it. As a creative entrepreneur, do you have any? Do you have the same issue, and how do you combat this?

Felicia Day  

I 100% have this issue. A lot of the things in the book, if you read it, are all things that I've struggled with over the years. And finishing things is the most important thing that I've kind of come to the conclusion about creativity. The best thing about creativity is that it's spontaneous; we come up with ideas out of joy and enthusiasm, and the unfortunate part is when we get into the work of the creativity, we kind of lose a little bit of that steam when we get into the weeds of stuff. The underlying message of my book is that you have to embrace the work of creativity full force in order to get your creativity out in the world. The most you will learn from doing something creative is finishing things. Because it's only when you get it out and can see that piece of creativity with a bird's side that you really get the full impact of what you were trying to say. The full impact of education, of getting better at your creativity--unless you finish it, you don't know how to make it better. So I guess that's the biggest lesson for me as creator: seeing things through, being able to work on them and then step away and say, "Okay, that's the best I could do at the time.", and learning lessons from that piece of creativity that you can take in your future creative work.

I remember reading in chapter three, that it talks a lot about how difficult maintaining creativity from youth can be because of how suppressive our environments can be to kind of like, tamp down on that creativity. And I personally feel like that's only gotten stronger due to social media, like Instagram and Twitter that really magnify both praise and ridicule. What have you done for your own creativity now to block out those negative voices?

Felicia Day  

The beautiful thing about social media is that we have so many more outlets for our creativity, we have so many different ways to express ourselves, and we can kind of go around gatekeepers to get our creativity to people in a new way. So those are awesome things, but like you said, the other side of that is that we are pretending to kind of live our lives in a very demonstrative way--kind of looking toward the end result of something versus experiencing it for ourselves or really creating because it's something we inside need to create, regardless of how it will be received. I talked about a lot of those issues in my book. That's why I kind of suggest when you're doing the book, stay as much as you can off of social media. And  later in the book, I kind of emphasize it: in order to be creative, you need to let your mind out to wander without filling it up constantly with tweets and sharing and looking at something with the sole goal of sharing it. You can actually absorb something like a sunset or a concert or an experience, and just let it sit inside you and affect you as a creator versus like in media where your sharing it without reflecting on why you enjoy it, or why you feel like this is a part of your world or worldview. So, you know, I think a lot of the book is me, after I had a baby, kind of piecing myself together, digging deep and trying to figure out who I am as a creator, 'what do I actually have to say?', 'What do I need to say outside of all these things that people are telling me to be?' And so, there's a lot of things in the book to deal with all these things that are pressuring us, especially in the world of social media.

Absolutely, and one thing that I noticed about the book while reading was, it definitely seemed very very personal, and a lot of the creative exercises that you included were very emotional and were all about drawing those emotions out and about personal introspection, and why you encourage people to go through the book slowly, because of that. Were there any chapters that were especially difficult for you to write because of that introspection?

Felicia Day  

I mean, yeah, I think that when you have a personal story attached to something, it makes it more actionable and more human. And so whenever I could, I would illustrate talking about anxiety or procrastination or anything, because I've been affected by all of these things. That's kind of my life's quest to overcome my own enemies inside to get my creativity out. And so we have all this stuff built up inside of us, and the more personal and emotional we can be in our approach to overcoming those barriers inside of us, the easier they fall. And so I guess, the most exciting part, for me, was talking about the things that really keep me back, especially the anxiety chapter talks a lot about different techniques that I've developed over the years to be able to deal with my very anxious character, and I had to have the analogy in there of a six-sided dice. [laughs] So there's like six techniques, each of which is going to be a side of a dice and I thought that was a really cool analogy and it made me excited to write about something that's very hard for me to deal with, which is constantly being anxious and be held back and inhibited by my body kind of going into panic mode when I'm either on a stage or in a judgmental situation. I, in working through the book, found a lot of things about my own character and my own self that I'm excited to work on and kind of tackle. In a way, we're constantly growing, we're constantly becoming different people as we age and move through life, and I think the trick is to, you know, allow ourselves to grow and become different, but never let go of the root of who we are. And sometimes they can become muddy and you have to just go back and start digging and excavating who you are to kind of clarify where you want to go in the future.

Yeah, any anxiety chapter really resonated with me in terms of like trying to center yourself and get back in control of, you know, your body and your mind. So you've dipped your toes into several creative wells from writing to acting, and of course, gaming; Are there any creative projects or mediums that you have not delved into yet but would like to?

Felicia Day  

Yeah, you know, I really would love to write a fiction book, and I would love to direct something--I've always been just a producer and a writer, and I've directed some of my smaller web videos, but never the bigger narrative things. And I'd really like to dig my teeth into that, because I really feel like I've had a lot of experience around that, but never directing myself. So that's something that I'm looking into 2020 to do, too, because I want to be constantly growing as the creator as well. And even writing the book made me kind of want to expand my horizons and try different things, because you never know where a curiosity will take you. And that's what's kind of beautiful about creativity: if you allow yourself to open that door and try something you never thought you'd be interested in, it could be something that could transform your life.

Yeah, thank you so much. We're like right at 10 minutes, so if you have time for one last kind of fun question, if you could live in a world that was created by Jim Henson puppetry like Farscape, The Dark Crystal, or Labyrinth, which would you choose?

Felicia Day  

Oh my gosh! I loved Fraggle Rock as a kid. I'd love to have those animals in my house. So, [laughs] 

--can I just live with some Fraggles? That would be kind of amazing! Oh wait Doozer? Doozer that's it, Doozer. I wanted a Doozer my whole life.

[laughs]

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