Yara and Aaron Nielsenshultz
The Writing "Peppers"

Yara and Aaron Nielsenshultz, the Writing Peppers, help ambitious coaches, consultants, and solopreneurs use the power of the written word to get more clients and make more sales.

Yara's Story

Can I tell you a secret?

Sometimes, I hate writing. With a passion. It wasn't always this way, though. As a kid, I wrote stories and letters all the time. I started my first neighborhood newspaper when I was 9 years old. I became a writing tutor in middle school and continued tutoring peers in writing all the way through college. And then I taught General Education Writing at California State University as a graduate student.

I LOVED writing. Did it for fun. So what changed? I'm not really sure. Perhaps it was the pressure of trying to be the BEST writer once I got to college. I woke up one day and realized that even though I was gifted at writing, that didn't mean I HAD to do it. That realization gave me such a feeling of relief and freedom.

I still wrote—I was Technical Writer and Managing Editor on the first editions of Joyce Lain Kennedy's Resumes for Dummies, Cover Letters for Dummies, and Job Interviews for Dummies, and then I became the resident copy writing expert at ResMed, a medical manufacturing company—but I knew that I didn't have to write if I chose not to.

So I became a trainer, instructional designer, and professional development coach, and eventually got a Master's degree in Education. I still wrote, all the time, in fact. But I didn't HAVE to. That was the key.

And over time, I realized a curious thing. I love teaching people how to write professional, business-oriented copy. At ResMed, even when it wasn't part of my job, people throughout the company asked for my help with their writing. I've helped friends and family with formal documents, web sites, resumes and cover letters, applications, and so much more. I love seeing them get results from their writing.

So that's why I'm here, offering to help you use powerful writing to connect with your clients. I want to help you get results from your writing. The fun for me in writing is enabling people to take an average bit of copy and make it fantastic—copy that gets clients excited and makes them want to take the next step.

I understand exactly how hard writing can be. I know how frustrating, time-consuming, soul-wrenching, and tedious it can be … And how glorious. When it works, when it's right, it is wonderful. I want to help other business people make writing work for them, too.

Aaron's Story

I didn’t know much about writing until I was a senior in high school. As you might guess, I wasn’t, therefore, very good at it. Oh, I did all right with it, muddling by, but it wasn’t until my senior English teacher began demystifying writing for me that I finally began to see what writing could be.

Up to that point I was a solidly medium student in both work habits and production, and I didn’t exactly change over night. In short, I was just like many of the students who would populate my writing classes when I was an English professor. I should have, in retrospect, told them that more often …

For me, it’s the love of words that drives my love of language. Like Yara, I’ve always been a reader, and there is little that’s as amazing for me as the interplay of words. Literature drove me through school and into university; literature drove me to teach university English, completing an MA and most of a PhD along the way. Even when I left teaching to stay home with our kids, I loved to play word games with them, with rhymes and poems, songs and synonyms our playthings on walks and car rides.

My work over the years as a freelance-writer reminded me, though, that there were people out there who were like me, people who had great things to say and great thoughts in their brains, but who either didn’t realize how well they could write or who thought that writing was somehow beyond them. When I stretched my writing work into writing consulting, I found that I could share my own joy with language again, empowering other people to find that abundance of writing wisdom in them.

And that rocks.

Our Story

We met in college. Aaron was wearing a t-shirt that said "A room without books is like a body without a soul" (Cicero). I knew at that moment that I had to meet him. A few months later we were dating and in less than a year we were married.

Where is our last name from? Aaron was Nielsen and I was Shultz. We had heard that hyphenated names often get shortened, so we decided to just stick 'em together as one long name. Yes, Aaron changed his name, too.

We now have two kids (a boy and girl), two dogs, and two cats. (We like pairs, it seems.) We recently moved to the Kansas City area from San Diego (yes, a BIG change), and we love it. The thunderstorms, the trees, the people, the schools—absolutely wonderful.