- You are here:
- Home »
- Blog
Writers’ Rough Drafts – Episode #41 With Sol Orwell
Or listen on: iTunes| Stitcher| Spotify| Google Play| Download
Sol Orwell is an entrepreneur, author, writer, public speaker, and cookie aficionado. He’s been building websites since 1997, and he sold a number of them fresh out of university to set himself up for a “semi-retirement,” during which time he traveled throughout the United States and Argentina for five years. Eventually he returned to Toronto, Canada, where he bought the domain Examine.com, and began building out what has become one of the most respected health and nutrition information sites on the internet — all from spending time on Reddit chatting with others about his own quest to get healthier and lose weight.
Though he’s now quite fit, he’s not obsessive about it, as evidenced by his retired #cookie-life fun and current Cookie-Off Fundraisers, the most recent of which raised over $100K for charity. When he isn’t building empires or stuffing friends’ faces with delicious chocolate chip cookies, he writes short blasts regularly on his Facebook profile and 2 – 4 times a month on his own website, making observations on the worlds of entrepreneurship and digital technology and the many biases that infiltrate these spaces.
Continue reading
Anxiety and Stress Relief Through Writing
I never planned to become a freelance writer—I had been employed as an administrator for only two years in a community-based office in the center of my town, only a stone’s throw away from my home.
I had to write a few snippets and letters for work, and looking back now, I had found writing soothing and it put me at ease.
Writing made me panic-free, almost as if I was possessed by it in some sort of positive way. I just never realized it at that time.
Continue reading
What’s a Writing Coach and Why Do I Need One?
Your motivation has become stagnant, the words on your unfinished manuscript stare back from the page with dumb accusation, the last thing you want to do is open your computer, and deadlines are elbowing up to you like inconsiderate riders in a crowded subway car.
You want to scream, rethink your profession, maybe change your name and open a Cinnabon in Omaha. Or maybe your situation is less dramatic, and you just want to level up your writing game, or tackle a daily writing practice or a project larger than you’ve ever worked on before.
Wherever you fall in this range, it’s probably time to find a writing coach.
Continue reading
How To Write Short Texts: 3 Tips on Narrative Dynamics and Style
There are long texts, and there are short texts. In our current digital reality, there are also very short texts. Regardless of length, a text that is meaningful and successful is more than a sum of its parts, that is, its words. If that weren’t true, a massive historical novel spanning three volumes would always have been preferable to a short story of a few thousand words.
In fact, however, there is no qualitative difference based solely on the length of a work. An op-ed, when written with skill, can have much wider repercussions than a nonfiction book dealing with a similar issue. But although the above might appear self-evident, the question remains:
Why are some short texts so meaningful and successful?