Weekend Writer Review: Embrace Your Weird: Face Your Fears and Unleash Creativity by Felicia Day

Hey all, Dani here.

Is today’s post a little bit of a hybrid between a typical review and also a Weekend Writer post? Well, sort of. I mean, I’m counting it as both. That’s for sure. But I can’t travel through this one like I’m doing with my Weekend Writer posts. In the book, there are a bunch of really cool writing and creativity exercises, but Felicia herself suggests keeping the contents of the book to yourself, so I’m just going to sort of give a vague emotional mess type of review for this, and then encourage you to go pick up the book yourself.

So enjoy this review that is also sort-of a bonus Weekend Writer post (because the regular post will be up as scheduled tomorrow).

Summary

In Embrace Your Weird, New York Times bestselling author, producer, actress, TV writer, and award-winning web series creator, Felicia Day takes you on a journey to find, rekindle, or expand your creative passions.

Including Felicia’s personal stories and hard-won wisdom, Embrace Your Weird offers:

—Entertaining and revelatory exercises that empower you to be fearless, so you can rediscover the things that bring you joy, and crack your imagination wide open

—Unique techniques to vanquish enemies of creativity like: anxiety, fear, procrastination, perfectionism, criticism, and jealousy

—Tips to cultivate a creative community

—Space to explore and get your neurons firing

Whether you enjoy writing, baking, painting, podcasting, playing music, or have yet to uncover your favorite creative outlet, Embrace Your Weird will help you unlock the power of self-expression. Get motivated. Get creative. Get weird.

My Thoughts

Rating: 5 stars

This book was another perfect one to devour early on in my process of trying to return to having a creative lifestyle. It was relatively easy to have such a vast focus on all of my creative projects in high school and college, but the adult life has strained the process for me, and it has been just an immense struggle for me to get those creative juices flowing in the same way as they used to. So books like this or like Wonderbook by Jeff Vandermeer are great, because they do look at the creative process.

Honestly I’ll put this one a bit higher than Wonderbook, but that’s because it focuses on a lot of other elements of storytelling, whereas this delightful self-help/how-to/inspirational book is utterly devoted to developing a creative lifestyle, whether that is waking it up for the first time, reigniting that spark, or jumping over/breaking through any of those pesky road blocks along the way.

Have pens/pencils/markers/highlighters/etc around you when you delve into this book, though. There are a lot of fun, unique, and sometimes wild exercises proposed to you within these pages. Yes, I read through this without doing a single one of them…but that’s because I was reading my signed copy and I didn’t want to mess it up. I ordered a second copy, and that will be the one where I follow all of the instructions and exercises, and I definitely think it will be a helpful experience.

This book was like sitting down at a cafe with Felicia Day and talking to her about creating, the joys and the frustrations, and having her be that cheerleader in your corner, helping to drive you to do more, create more, be more. I lost track of how many times I related to what she was saying, or how many times this book made me laugh. For the record, she likes to use poop jokes, so that happens quite a few times.

But this book also made me tear up a bit, and I’m not saying that as a bad thing. Some of the statements made, or some of the descriptions used, just resonated so deeply within my squishy creative core and I couldn’t help but respond in an emotional way. I definitely felt more inspired and more determined to just create after I read through this book, and I imagine that will be true even more here in a couple weeks when I can read through the book again and work through all of the exercises.

I definitely highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to live a creative life (whether that is writing, filming, baking, acting, whatever), or heck, for anyone who lives around a creative type person. Maybe this will help you connect with and support the creatives in your life better.

So embrace what makes you weird and get out there and create something. I think you can do it, and Felicia does too.

Where to Get a Copy

You can get your own copy from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-million, Book Depository, or your local independent bookstore. I recommend getting a physical copy, but if you get a digital copy, have a notebook handy for all of the exercises and such.

You can also check with your local library. Again, if you borrow this from a library, have a notebook around so you can still do the exercises. Don’t write in the library copy.