Fortune Feimster first came into contact with improvisation during her studies. In an interview with QTom Power, the comedian, actor and author, says she loved it so much that she decided to try it herself.

“Then they said, ‘Actually, it costs about $600 to take the classes,'” she says. “And as a broke student, I was like, ‘Whoa, there it is!’ So I just left it in the past and didn’t think about it again.

A few years later, Feimster left her home state of North Carolina and went to Los Angeles. But unlike most L.A. transplants, she didn’t seek fame and fortune. “I just looked at it as a life experience,” she says.

VIEW | Fortune Feimster’s full interview with Tom Power:

Feimster found it difficult to make friends in her new city. “It’s a very difficult place to connect with people,” she says. “They’re not really interested. Everyone kind of stays in their own lane.”

To network, she took classes at The Groundlings, the legendary LA improv theater that has produced a number of plays Saturday Night Live Actor.

“It was like lightning,” she says of her experience at The Groundlings. “A lightbulb went off and said, ‘My God, where was this?'”

And Feimster not only loved improvising, she was really good at it.

“I just remember the teachers kept saying, ‘Hey, you’re really good at this. You have to keep doing this,’” she says. “And I was just having fun. … I think it was my teachers who reinforced that to me, who made me think, ‘Oh, there’s something there.'”

VIEW | Preview of Crushing It:

Feimster is the star of her own hour-long Netflix comedy special. Smash it. While it is her third stand-up special, the previous two only lasted half an hour. She says putting together an entire hour of material was a completely different process.

“With half an hour you just throw jokes at the wall,” she says. “That’s funny, that’s funny, that’s funny – and nothing has a through line or a story behind it. I really wanted (Smash it) to have a narrative, and I wanted it to feel like a little book with a beginning, a middle, and a full-circle end. I had never done that before. So the challenge was to figure out how to do this. Now I feel like I’ve gotten used to this style of storytelling.”

Smash it is now streaming on Netflix.

The full interview with Fortune Feimster is available on our podcast Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Fortune Feimster, produced by Kaitlyn Swan.