I’d like to talk about a problem that has plagued me for years, without me knowing what to call it or how to talk about it. It’s a problem I call over-manipulation.

Most writers seem to run into it at one point or another, and surprisingly little advice is available to help deal with it.

Over-manipulation is not something that only has to do with writing, but any self-improvement, including exercise, nutrition, psychological work, and spirituality. This post is focused on writers, but some of the observations I make here may be helpful in other ways.

To talk about over-manipulation we have to first define manipulation. Here, I’m not talking about manipulation as in dishonest communication or emotional bullying. I mean manipulation in a more basic sense, like manipulating an object.

We can use technology and knowledge to manipulate our environments (air conditioning, heating), and to manipulate our bodies (exercise, medicine). In fact, exercise is basically a sustained practice of manipulating your body so that it becomes better at something.

Think of stretching—you move yourself in a certain way that’s beyond your resting state, then repeat or hold it. If you exercise the right way for long enough, you can make a lot better than it used to be.

Looking at it this way, we can think of all training as a self-manipulation. In a good way; it’s hard not see the benefit of education, exercise, practice, any way you push your own limits.

Writing requires self-manipulation. You discipline yourself to pay attention and write even when you don’t feel like it. And eventually, you have a manuscript to show for that.

So what’s over-manipulation? It’s when the part of yourself you’re trying to manipulate suffers because of it. You can exercise in an excessive way that causes you to hurt yourself. You can study or train to an extent that it’s wearing you out and making you resent what you’re learning. You can focus on self-improvement to an extent that puts you at odds with your natural self.

Any process of personal work—be it spiritual, artistic, fitness-related, or anything else—requires a balance between self-acceptance and self-improvement, between striving and taking it easy.

Over-manipulation is a state of stress that comes from imbalance toward self-improvement.

Over-manipulation and editors

Over-editing is over-manipulation of your writing caused by another person. This is when the editorial process is invasive, pushing the author’s work into a state they’re not happy with and ultimately not good for the work or the author.

Revision is one way we manipulate our written work. Going with the exercise metaphor, revision is a time to stretch, tone, and strengthen.

An editor, then, is like a personal trainer. Editors have special expertise to help you shape and improve your work in ways that are hard or almost impossible to do all by yourself. This means a (hopefully careful) level of manipulation.

But just as a personal trainer can push you too hard, an editor can over-manipulate the editing process. This is something most writers I know have an understandable fear of. At some stage or another, authors usually have a lot of tenderness about their writing, in part because of how much inner work and emotional energy that went into it. So even gentle manipulation from a skilled editor can feel painful.

There’s a difference, however, between a painful but helpful improvement and manipulations that are actually controlling. A caring editor, like a caring trainer, will be able to agree upon goals with you and push you to reach them while respecting you, your work, and your boundaries. A controlling editor disrespects the purpose of your work, and their role in helping you shape it, by going over those boundaries. If the editor’s choices are structured around their tastes, with little or no regard to your artistic goals, it can turn into a battle of wills between the author’s vision and the editor’s. This results in an author who is over-manipulated, worn out, and maybe very scared of ever trusting someone to assist in manipulating their work ever again.

Over-manipulation and you

Over-manipulation is far from a problem that only comes from other people, however. How might you be over-manipulating yourself, and how can you tell?

Personal experience of this will vary widely. Some things are good indicators, though:

• You feel like you can’t do anything right with your writing.
• You’re terrified of getting your story wrong.
• Certain standards of good writing haunt you, as if you don’t feel you will ever reach them.
• Writing is very painful (though this can indicate many other things, too).
• You’re afraid of letting everyone down: your agent, your readers, your editor, your friends. Yourself.

Does this sound familiar? Do you, by chance, feel like this isn’t describing a problem, but a normal writer experience?

Well, it probably is one.

For me, I notice I’m starting to feel over-manipulated when I am stiff about every word I write, as if the slightest whisper of imperfect prose will sink the whole book. When I feel suddenly unsure of every single decision I’ve made about the book. When I feel so overwhelmed I don’t even want to write the thing anymore. And this is not exactly an unusual occurrence for me.

A primary manifestation of over-manipulation in writers is perfectionism. Specifically, the fatigue or stress that comes with that perfectionism, which can block you from writing. Make you hate writing, even when it’s something you really want to do.

I find this a helpful distinction: perfectionism includes perfectionistic striving (the push to be better, grow, learn, reach a higher standard) and perfectionistic anxiety (the fear that you’re falling short or need to improve yourself more).

They both have a place. Anxiety is part of what spurs us to stay motivated to strive, so even that isn’t totally bad. But it’s one thing to strive in a way you feel overall happy about, maybe cautiously optimistic about, and another to strive through a seemingly endless maze of failures that only make you feel worse, not better.

Striving is good. But if all your pleasure in the process has been replaced by anxiety, you are probably over-manipulated.

And it’s no wonder. A great deal of advice for writers seems practically designed to over-manipulate you. That advice entails an array of ways to strive, a million prescriptions for self-improvement. It’s easy to get the sense that endless striving is all that matters.

But what do you do if advice is only making it worse?

How do you fix it?

Relieving over-manipulation is a conundrum. Some kind of manipulation is what we usually turn to in order to fix a problem and feel better. Over-manipulation, however, is a problem of exhaustion with the quest to be fixed. This can leave us with the sense that there is no answer.

One simple proposition is that the answer is rest. That may mean rest from writing, such as taking a break, or rest from the quest to self-improve. Give yourself a break. You might be trying too hard. But there’s a deeper truth under this, and it strikes me when I consider a piece of advice that is intended specifically to help authors overcome over-manipulation in rough drafts.

You may have heard this advice in the form “write shitty first drafts.” The idea is not only to take it easy on yourself as you draft, but to abandon entirely the goal of making it good. You write a fragrant swath of crap, and then you fix it.

This can help a lot of people. By giving yourself permission to not worry about quality as you draft, you change the goal. The goal becomes simply getting it written rather than making it good, which is a much simpler task. However, it doesn’t work for everyone, and may not help long-term with over-manipulation.

For some writers, their drafting process involves forms of striving so that their revision process is more bearable. The distinction of drafting as the time to just do and revision as the time to fix isn’t universal. More to the point, it can exacerbate the problem. Even though it helpfully gives you permission to worry about fixing a problem later, it still frames it as about problems that need fixing.

Over-manipulation is an imbalance between self-acceptance and self-improvement. We all need to strive, but we all need to accept, too, and it’s the latter part writers often have trouble with. Accepting the flaws in a rough draft can help, but it doesn’t necessarily translate to other forms of self-acceptance we may need.

What I encourage writers to do is to cultivate trust in their writing. Not just their skills, or their voice, but what their writing is about for them. The things they like about their own writing, just as it is.

Your writing isn’t merely crappy but fixable. There are good things about it now. Good artistically, and good in the place they inhabit in your life. You write for a reason, and that’s something to be valued.

Many authors start doing this by developing a healthy distrust for prescriptive writing advice, the kind that may have left them over-manipulated in the past. These prescriptivist rules can help, but the flip-side is they teach you to think of your writing as basically bad and needing repair. Skepticism for these rules is a line of defense against over-manipulation, and teaches you that maybe not everything needs to be fixed. Maybe some things are just as they should be.

What I want writers to come away with is this: while you still no doubt have striving to do, wherever you are now is probably where you need to be. You don’t have to be different than you are right now. “Right now” is also going to be different later, and you will be different then too, in a way that hopefully your striving will help with. But you’re not doing anything wrong by being where you are. To push you also need to rest, and resting can mean loving what is already there.

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May Peterson is an editor and writing consultant who loves helping authors find their way. She is currently accepting new clients for developmental editing, line editing, sensitivity editing, and writing consultation.

If you liked this post and want to see May’s fiction writing, feel free to check out her book page here and her debut novel, Lord of the Last Heartbeat.