Nova Daily - 18 April 2026: Uploading frequency
Hi!
In 1545, painter Jacopo da Pontormo was commissioned to paint the frescoes of the Church of San Lorenzo in Florence, and he wanted to make these paintings his ultimate masterpiece. Motivated by his desire to outperform Michelangelo, he opted to work in secret. He closed off the chapel in which he was to paint, because he wanted no-one to loot from his ideas.
Pontormo essentially locked himself in the chapel for about eleven years, which was made easier by both his genius paranoia and his phobia for human contact. He meticulously worked on all the minute details for all this time, and carefully kept his work from the public view. No-one was to see it before it was finished.
How can you know that you created a great work if you never receive any feedback on it?
Uploading frequency
In a recent discussion in BlogChamps, the following question was raised:
How often should you upload a blog?
My joking answer was that I upload once a month, and maybe more often if I feel like it. However, my genuine answer to this question is a lot more nuanced. As with basically anything that you can try your hands at, it depends on what your goals are for writing. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, and this could easily be its own topic for a whole series of blogs.
It makes sense to think about the goal of your writing before you set pen to paper. When movies want to show a novelist suffering from writer's block, they often have him or her stare at a blank page, unable to put any words to it. I know enough about writing long coherent material to know that that's not how writing goes. In writing a book, it's not "words happen to appear on paper". There are several stages of planning that precede the first draft version.
Even in longer posts that I assembled start to finish in two days (my Time and Pawns blogs, for example), there is a lot of preliminary work involved. Putting everything into words, then, is the culmination of all the work that I've done beforehand. When words eventually do appear on paper, the lot is already planned out, and I can write at a very quick pace. Depending on whether people would be interested in it, I might chronicle my writing process for something that I intend to write.
Writing discipline
If your goal of writing is to do something in a more disciplined manner (which is one of the reasons why I started writing my blog on here in the first place), the best piece of advice that I can give is to get into the habit of writing regularly. It makes sense to plan and reserve time for your writing. That doesn't have to be daily per se. In fact, if you're starting your discipline routine from scratch, I wouldn't even necessarily recommend writing daily. But writing regularly is certainly important: talent alone isn't enough, and Pontormo is an instructive example.
Having written my Daily series for almost 500 days straight, I must say that I find it doable to maintain my current writing rhythm. That's not the same as easy: I've been running about a day late for a fair bit of time, and I hope to be able to catch up with that soon. But I'm not skipping or writing something that I wouldn't want to publish, just for the sake of hitting a check mark. If I write, I want to write something that's worth reading.
Journaling at a set time of day makes sense for people who have a very structured day. I don't. My day-to-day activities are somewhat irregular. Not ER-level irregular, and normally I'd be able to get a lot of things done in my regular week, but irregular all the same. I often wind up writing a significant portion of my blog at night; sometimes even on my phone when I'm in bed. Editing on my phone is more time-consuming than on my PC, but it's doable if I'm only justifying text and adding imagery and YouTube videos.
Skill development and feedback
If you're writing to improve your skills, it's also useful to write regularly. In this case, I'd certainly recommend publishing regularly. Even if just to receive feedback on your writing. Without any feedback, you can't know if what you made is appealing to the public. Of course you can always keep writing to amuse yourself, but there is a lot that you can learn from your peers. Being in writing groups such as Substack or BlogChamps can really help you with a trick here and a tip there; sometimes even a small thing such as "Word wall" can drastically improve your writing for an online medium.
Pontormo is a great example of what can happen if you don't receive any feedback whatsoever. As relayed in The 48 Laws of Power, "Law 18: Do Not Build Fortresses to Protect Yourself—Isolation is Dangerous", Pontormo's friend Giorgio Vasari described the frescoes as having a "total lack of proportion". In micromanaging all the minute details, Pontormo had lost sense of the larger picture. The sense of the composition got lost in the details. As Robert Greene states:
These frescoes were visual equivalents of the effects of isolation on the human mind: a loss of proportion, an obsession with detail combined with an inability to see the larger picture, a kind of extravagant ugliness that no longer communicates.
The reason why I had to look up the name of Pontormo and never have to think twice about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is because those four painters were in touch with their audiences and their works have survived through the ages. Shakespeare was in touch with his audience. Robert Greene received feedback on his different versions of writing for eighteen years before he found his Life's Task. So for any aspiring writer who wants to improve and perfect their craft: upload regularly, and specifically request feedback to your work.
If you write and upload twice a month, that's great. It gives you time to work out your ideas, and have something to publish on a regular basis. And what's better: you're not boring your audience with your cloying presence.
