Upping the Ante
How to boost your confidence en route to your goal.
I don’t speak in superlatives very often, but the absolute best way to train a dog is through a process called shaping. The basic idea is that you don’t tell your dog what you want, but you reward them for doing it anyway.
“Hold on,” you’re probably saying. “Why would a dog do something for you—a trick, a recall, a stay, whatever—if you never tell them to do it? Let alone how to do it.”
Thank goodness I’m here to tell you. The trick to shaping is that you start small.
Of course, I don’t mean small in the physical sense, but in terms of easiness. The same principle holds for writing. If you’re like most people, you’re not gonna sit down and write a novel on command when someone hands you a pen—especially if you’ve never written anything beyond a high-school essay until this point. No, you’ll start with something easier—a paragraph, a journal entry, a page.
As for your dog, let’s say you want him to stand in a tiny cardboard box. Collect (1) a box that’s not tiny, but is roomy enough for him to fit inside comfortably, (2) a bag of treats, and (3) your dog. An optional item you can bring to the training session is (4) a clicker (I’ll explain more about that in a moment. For now, all you need to know is that it’s a handheld button that emits a loud click when pressed).
The second thing you need to do is very simple: put the box down near the dog. Unless your dog is totally distracted* or terrified of boxes,** he’s gonna check it out. The second he looks at it or sniffs it, press the clicker (if your dog has never experienced a clicker before, you should start by simply pressing the clicker and rewarding, over and over, until the dog has learned that the click means “you’re gonna get a treat!”). Instead of or in addition to the clicker, you can say a one-syllable word like “Yes!” or “Good!” Whatever sound you choose, you’ll use it to mark a behavior, the same way a camera click takes a snapshot to preserve the perfect pose.
*The solution for a distracted dog is to do your training in a boring room with no distractions.
**The solution for a terrified dog is to start with something that doesn’t resemble a box. A piece of cardboard, for instance.
In my parallel writing universe, I’d guess that this external marking of a dog’s behavior is analogous to making the conscious decision to write about … something. To sit down (click) and scrawl or type (click) with a purpose other than exercising your fingers. At the start, when you’re terrified that you cannot possibly write a single thing, just a bullet point for an outline or a sentence for a story will do.
Back to dogs: immediately after clicking, reward your dog with a treat. You can then either pick the box up and put it down again, or simply wait for the dog to do something with it again (either look at it, sniff it, or walk toward it, depending on the dog). After about five times, assuming your dog is hungry, he’ll have caught on that interacting with the box is quite valuable to him.
Clearly, writers aren’t going to stuff themselves with a piece of chocolate after every sentence. But when I’m finished writing my sentence, paragraph, page, or chapter, and I know I’ve accomplished a small goal of sorts, I allow myself to read what I wrote. Seeing that my labors produced a tangible result—no matter how much fixing or replacing will be necessary later—is the perfect reward for a writer.
Once a dog has caught onto the game of doing-something-for-a-treat, this is where shaping gets fun. Now you’re going to raise your criteria for the click. Rather than stagnate at that one level of behavior, you’ll expect further progress. If your dog was looking at the box for a reward, wait until he sniffs it to mark the behavior. If he was sniffing it, put it a little farther away and wait until he steps toward it. If he was already stepping toward it, wait until he paws at it. Then until he puts a paw inside the box. Then two paws, then … you get the idea.
There are two important things to remember about this stage of shaping: (1) it requires great patience to wait for your dog to try something new, and (2) if your dog gives up or goes into mental meltdown, you’re raising the criteria too fast.
If you’re a writer, these things might sound familiar. You know the tremendous patience and dedication that it takes to craft a story. You know just how much you can push yourself toward your goal without becoming overwhelmed and demoralized—and stop writing altogether (like 99% of people who say they’ve got a novel inside them to write, but then never end up writing it). You learn your craft in stages, you write some, you learn how to read your material critically and perfect what you’ve written. Eventually, you will write a complete work and be able to type THE END. Only now can you label it for what it is: a story!
Likewise, a trick that a dog learns through shaping only gets labelled once it’s complete. Your dog not only hops eagerly into the box, but stuffs himself into successively smaller and smaller boxes until he’s performing the behavior you had in mind all along. “Box!” you might call it, or “Get in!” You’re ready to ask him to repeat the performance in other places, with other boxes of various shapes and sizes, and you’re reasonably confident that he’ll do what you ask.
Best of all, shaping has created a thinking dog, who voluntarily offers harder and harder behaviors all along the way to the finished product. He knows that when you get out your clicker and your treats, all he has to do is start offering behaviors and he’ll figure it out. Training him to do other tricks becomes an easy feat.
Though the book we want to write is bound to take longer than the trick we teach a dog, we too can use the principle of shaping to simplify the process. All we have to do is start with an easy goal, accomplish it, and move on to something harder. We’ll learn how to write the first description of setting, dialogue, backstory, action … and keep upping our skills so we can write more. We’ll knock off the first page, first chapter, midpoint, climax, book. And because we’ve taught ourselves how to do it, why stop with one book? We can do it again, and again, and again...
Happy Tales!
I always remember sitting with a longtime friend over a couple of beers and him telling me this very long story about a book he was writing involving a terrorist attack on an oil rig. (He once worked on an oil rig.) His story was fascinating and backed by his personal expertise. When he finished, I asked him how many pages he had written so far, and his answer was "two." That's where the 99% fit in. 😀
❤️❤️❤️❤️🤣🤣🤣 I think Tock is.