Nine Big Lessons My Fearful Puppy Taught Me About Writing
We are all many things, complicated and weird and unpredictable. And so is the very best writing.
This is a happy story about a dog.
I promise it’s a happy story even though it’s not all the way happy, because no story is ever all the way happy. But don’t worry that it’s an actual sad dog story. It’s 100% not, I promise.
It’s a love story about my dog, Frannie, an eight-pound maltipom with an eight-ton personality, and the eight—no, nine!—notable ways in which she teaches me to be a better writer.
A few more words about love: Part of the reason I learn from Frannie is that I love her and she loves me, and that’s a very solid foundation for teaching and learning. Specifically, what I love about Frannie is her dandelion-fluff fur, her teeny-tiny underbite, her button eyes and corn-chip feet. Also the way she taps me with her nose to tell me things, and the way she wedges her warm little body against mine, as she is right now. I love Frannie with all that I am and a whole lot more, because I am not nearly enough to hold or even live up to the vastness of Frannie’s goodness. I don’t know how else to explain to you how much I love this dog.
But … I did not want her.
No, Frannie came into my life by accident, just as she came into the world by accident, when some college kids thought it could be fun to let their un-spayed, un-neutered dogs “hang out.”
It was 2019, and the youngest of my adult children, Billie, had recently moved back from China with their partner, Tao. The trees were burning with autumn, and Billie and Tao were in love. Their plan was to live with us for a couple of years while Billie finished school and Tao got his footing in this new country. There were lots of unknowns, including some unknown unknowns. Like, how, one day, one of Tao’s colleagues at Tea House, the restaurant where he worked, mentioned a friend of a friend’s cousin or some such having some puppies that needed homes. Something about an accidental pregnancy. Something about a video. Something about just look at them, it would be this one, see? The smaller one with the gray spots, the one doing all those little flips? That one. She’s five months old already, it won’t be that hard. She uses puppy pads! Please, please, please, please?
Our family dog, Louis, a very hungry boy and an expert food thief (his favorite food was chocolate, and yes, we know about chocolate), was, at age fifteen, already in diapers and starting to lose strength in his back legs. He was also fully deaf and mostly blind. We weren’t sure how much time we had left with him. But since he still loved eating and eating and eating, eating with gusto and cunning, eating with ravenous desire, eating as if his life depended on it—oh, how Louis loved food—we figured his will to live was still strong. We figured he was going to stay awhile.
So, given Louis’s declining health increasing care needs combined with his zest for life, how on earth would we manage another dog?
We’ll look after the new dog, she’ll be mostly our dog, you guys will barely need to do a thing.
At first, that plan kind of worked. For example, even though Frannie was actually almost six months old by the time she came to us, and had actually only ever used puppy pads—she had no idea what outside even was!—Billie expertly house-trained her, including teaching her how to ring a bell at the back door when she needed to go out.
What we came to understand, as we integrated Frannie into our home life, is that she had barely ever left the big kitchen playpen where she was raised with her Pomeranian mom and several maltipom littermates. She’d had a near total lack of exposure and socialization.
It turns out, that’s a big deal.
Jon and I are dog people now, but before Frannie, we were just people who had a dog. We really didn’t know a whole lot. Louis had always been easy going. He wasn’t what you’d call well trained, but he was a teddy bear. Other than his thieving and conniving and the digestive outbursts that followed, he was pretty easy.
Frannie, on the other hand, was not.
Although she is incredibly gentle, affectionate, playful, and funny, is terrified of pretty much everything—like the mail carrier and big dogs, obviously, but also like shadows, dust, and shoeboxes that weren’t there yesterday. And the way Frannie expresses her fears is through hysterical barking. But the point I was trying to make is that at first, Billie and Tao were mostly in charge of Frannie, even though she slept in our room, because, well, so did Louis, and we already got up early to let him out, so it just made sense.
What happened next? Halloween and Thanksgiving and Christmas. Through it all, Frannie barked her head off at trick-or-treaters, visiting family members, and delivery people.
Also, she went to puppy school, where she also barked.
When I say Frannie barked, I mean, she barked and barked and barked and barked and barked and barked and barked.
Sometimes, she even barked in her sleep.
We Googled and read blogs and articles and messaged our puppy school trainer and read more blogs and articles. Also, I cried.
Meanwhile, Louis grew weaker and blinder, but kept eating. His diapers worked to keep the urine in only about half of the time. I thought that was stressful. Then, something truly stressful happened: the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to everything else Covid wrought around the globe, it also meant that starting on March 14, 2020, Frannie stopped coming within six feet of almost all other people or dogs for what felt like a ten billion years. Meanwhile, Billie and Tao kind of broke up and kind of got back together and then kind of broke up again, all while quarantining in our house with us. Then Tao moved to Philly for a job. Billie bought a condo in St. Paul and got licensed for foster care. Louis’s fur thinned out and his back legs grew ever weaker and we stopped taking walks and started carrying him up and down the stairs.
Louis kept eating.
Frannie kept barking.
It wasn’t until almost two years after Frannie appeared in our lives—end of summer of ’21—when Louis’s weakness and pain finally reached a point where we knew he was ready to go, even though he was still, against the odds, ravenous. So with broken hearts, we filled his bowl with a giant brownie (poison or not, chocolate called to Louis, and managed to steal plenty of it in his very long life), three scoops of ice cream, and clouds of whipped cream. Then we held him and kiss him goodbye as the vet eased him on his way.
We cried and cried. We loved him so.
Meanwhile, the pandemic was slowly shifting, the world was creaking opening more and more, and we faced continual new opportunities to expose Frannie to all the new people, places, and experiences she’d missed her whole life. New opportunities to train her away from her constant hypervigilant barking.
Since then, Frannie’s learned a lot. So have I.
Including a few things about writing.
1. Nobody Loves to Be Barked At
Turns out, people don’t love barking. Some people are better sports about it than others, and a few people are genuinely compassionate toward barking and its underlying caueses, but no one really likes it. That said, most people do recognize that barking serves a purpose—you know, a little alarm bark that stops once the sound is identified, or some excited yipping and howling in response to a neighborhood dog choir, or a low warning bark and growl if something is really wrong. What this tells me about writing is that dynamics matter a whole lot, especially when writing about harsh and traumatic things. We can “bark” if necessary, but we can’t bark and bark and bark. If we do, people will either tune out or go berserk. So, we have to be very intentional and generally cautious about barking, and we most certainly have to modulate our barking if we want to keep anyone’s attention.
2. Pay Attention
Speaking of attention, if you follow this Substack, you know I believe beautiful writing starts with paying attention, and that we should establish and maintain an an attention practice as part of our craft. Thankfully, Frannie has taught me loads about how to do a better job of noticing the world, because, well, she notices everything, including, as mentioned, the box that wasn’t there yesterday and the back-up beeping of a Fed-Ex truck a block away. But she also notices other important cues like the fact that I’ve taken a shower (during which she generally posts up on the bathroom rug or just outside the door). From there, she watches for patterns. For example, if I throw clothes on after the shower and come downstairs with wet hair, all is well and she can go back to sleep. But if I dry my hair, Frannie stays on my heel, watching to see whether I put shoes on, and which ones. Flipflops are good news, and she might go tug on her leash. But if I pull on real shoes, she’ll hover close until I do additional things that confirm a likely departure by car (take keys from the dish or put things in my tote bag, etc.) then scoot over to her crate and look at me expectantly, waiting for her Kong. And these are just a few small examples of the miracle of Frannie’s attention skills. I want my writing to be as electric with attention as Frannie’s daily life.
3. Stay Curious & Smell Things
Despite her many phobias and her barking, Frannie is a very curious little dog, full of play and mischief. But the real lesson she’s taught me about curiosity and writing is that every trip outside is an opportunity to get right up under the skin of the world—an opportunity to study this spinning rock we call home, touch it, and, yes, sometimes smell it. Maybe not smell the base of tree trunks like Frannie does, but those low-hanging branches? The single wild rose now blooming in our shade garden? The cloud of smoke billowing out from the window on the corner where the med students live? Yes! And I want to stop and notice the apples rotting on the sidewalk, too, and the black walnuts oozing in the grass. All distinct sensory experiences that add texture, vividness, and even a sense of meaningful seasonality as we move through the world. After all, we’re all animals, living in animal bodies. Tuning into our senses adds dimension and life to the writing and makes our words real in a way that “tacking on some sensory details” never will.
4. Set A Goal & Be Consistent
When house-training an almost-six-month-old small-breed dog to ring a bell at the door, you must be wholly consistent. You cannot veer, ever, from your methods. For example, if you do not ring that damn bell every single time you open the door, she will not learn that the bell makes the door open, which in turn will lead her to ring it for herself. And if you want to know more about house-training a dog, you can find that online—that’s not what this is about. It’s about how being a thousand percent consistent really works when you’re doing something hard, like, say, house-training a dog, or writing. For the latter, you might need to set a schedule and stick to it, or make a word count goal and stick to it, or set a submission goal and stick to it, or all of the above … and stick to it. It’s the only way anything ever gets done.
5. Forgive Fast & Keep Going
Our house-training method with Frannie was so effective that even Louis, who was only ever about eighty-percent house-trained at best, starting ringing the bell to go outside (proving that old dogs absolutely CAN learn new tricks!). Of course, as quickly and well as she learned, Frannie did have some accidents in the beginning, as expected. And in those instances, all we could do is bring her outside anyway, to remind everyone of how it is supposed to work, then keep going. This same principle works with writing. If you fall off your schedule, miss your goal, fuck off for a whole day, week, month, or year, all you can do is sit back down and write anyway, then keep going. One other point on this: dogs are extremely forgiving, and we can learn from them. Frannie loves children, and is bananas for our grandchildren. But when our foster grandson joined our family a year ago at age twenty months, he had never been around an animal—plus, he had a lot of trauma. Not surprisingly, he did not know how to be gentle with Frannie. Frannie learned quickly to get out of his way, but she also learned we wouldn’t let him hurt her. Meanwhile, we had to work diligently and tirelessly to teach Z how to be gentle with Frannie and to never, ever hit her. Sometimes he failed, and it was unbelievably stressful. But we all came through it, and now Z is Frannie’s best friend. There’s a lesson in this for our writing, too—the lesson that change is often more possible than it seems, and our work can change, too—can transform beyond recognition, soften into something as tender and fragile and miraculous as a thing fresh born to this world, which is what we actually always are each day.
6. If It’s Not Working, Start Over
Unlike our spectacularly successful house-training methods, early efforts to address Frannie’s barking were disastrous. For example, with regard to Frannie’s hysterical barking/lunging at big dogs, we found an almost hypnotically convincing YouTube trainer whose method involved turning away from the big dog and walking in the other direction to show your dog that you are in charge and that you recognize “the threat.” This worked really well on YouTube. And we were supposed to follow this plan for however long it took Frannie to learn to trust us. The problem was, Frannie would go even more apoplectic as soon as we turned around. In fact, she’d pulling furiously at the leash behind us, barking and snarling like a maniac to make sure the other dog understood that even though we were stupid enough to turn our backs to danger, she was not. For a long while I assumed this method (and several others) failed because we weren’t doing it right. Only after time did I come to realize that in fact, some methods just work better for some dogs than others. Duh. We had to start over many times before we found a method that finally did help Frannie (hand-feeding to increase her attentiveness to us even under “threat” by other dogs, and using treats to hold her attention until the “threat” passes safely on the other side of the street). We’re using a similar treat-based method for door behavior, and it’s working (along with the inadvertent desensitization training she’s getting from our foster grandson, Z, who loves to ring the doorbell). The point, though, is that writing is just the same. Sometimes what we’re trying to do with structure or topic or style just isn’t working. Maybe it worked before. Or maybe it worked for another writer, or for lots of other writers. But that doesn’t mean it will work for us now. And we might be better served by starting over with a new approach.
7. Learn From Others & Don’t Give Up
This is a tricky one, because sometimes we do need—as I just said—to start over or quit things that are not working. But on the other hand, we shouldn’t necessarily give up on things we love and care about just because they’re hard. If you’ve met Frannie, as some of you have, you know that she has been a handful. I know there are folks (probably many folks) who’d have re-homed her early on. I’m not going to get into the ethics of re-homing an animal here. I can only say I’m grateful that we have the resources—mainly, sturdy emotional constitutions, a modicum of skill, and the ability to work from home and invest in a lot of treats—to work with consistently with Frannie, and that consistent work is paying off, as consistent work almost always does, no matter how slow it sometimes seems. The same thing is true of our writing. Despite frustrations, failures, rejections, fallow spells, and the crippling self-doubt we all sometimes experience, if we just continue curiously and devotedly applying ourselves to the craft, our work will certainly improve. Notice that I didn’t say, “if we just keep writing our work will certainly improve.” I don’t think that’s true. Japanese violinist Shinichi Suzuki, who invented the now world-famous Suzuki method, said something along the lines of how we’re not really practicing until we’ve learned to play the song. In the same vein, it’s entirely possible, and not particularly useful, to “practice writing bad sentences,” as one of my astute grad school faculty once said. We don’t want to do that. I mean, we’re going to write some bad sentences, and we should let ourselves do that when we need to! Sometimes, we should write bad sentences on purpose just to shake off the jitters. Perfectionism is simply not useful. But we don’t want to unconsciously practice writing bad sentences over and over. Back to Frannie: we’ve learned from several trainers that we must try not to let her “rehearse” unwanted behaviors—namely her hysterical barking—because the more she rehearses that behavior, the more she will perform it. This was a very helpful bit of wisdom, which I learned only through looking to others who know more than I do. Similarly, with our writing, we want to keep learning from others and stay voraciously hungry, insatiably curious, and unendingly attentive to that mesmerizing, breathtaking, reassuring, heartbreaking, and ceaselessly unstable intersection of world, self, and craft. If we do that, we will never stop developing and expanding ourselves as artists and humans, no matter how often we fail.
8. Kiss More Often
If there’s one thing Frannie does almost as often as bark, it’s kiss. She’s the most affectionate, loving, expressive little creature that ever was. And of course, I know we can’t go around kissing everyone the way Frannie does—but most of us can kiss more often than we do, and if the pandemic taught us anything, it just might be the preciousness of that truth. I’ve taken to kissing my kids and closest friends on the cheek every time we say good-bye. Most of us could benefit from showing love more openly and often. I know we hear it all the time, and even more since the pandemic: Life is short and fragile. We hear it so often we don’t hear it anymore. And yet, it’s truer than it ever has been. So kiss as often as you can. What does this have to do with writing? I’m not really sure, other than the fact that all poetry is, says the inimitable Dorianne Laux, preparation for death, and I believe her. So I kiss.
9. Surprise Yourself
Last but not least, Frannie has shown me, again and again and again, the value of surprise and the truth of complexity. She’s afraid of almost everything—except thunder and fireworks, about which she could care less. How can this be? Who knows. Dogs and people are complicated. Also, despite her phobias, Frannie is a world-class traveler who loves a long car ride and adores every kind of boat travel. Who’d have guessed? But she spins in circles of excitement as soon as she sees her life vest. What I’m trying to say is that none of us are just one thing. We are all many things, complicated and weird and unpredictable. And so is the very best writing.
Love,
Jeannine
Thank you for this. My dog just passed away and it’s been terribly difficult to keep writing through the grief, so writing about your dog and the lessons you learned from her spoke to me on multiple levels. I’m saving this one for when I need to “re-train” my writer brain.
That picture of your dog! I haven’t even read the piece yet, I just had to comment on the cuteness 💜