Did you know that in a certain survey, 2,342 participants said that M&Ms are their favorite food?

Oh, by the way, how many M&M's are in this jar? Give it a guess... The closest person wins.

Are you done? Oh... still trying to count? Okay... you counting across the bottom, and then multiplying? Dude... just guess. My guess is 1000. What's yours?

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Did you guess yet? Okay... was your guess over 500? Congratulations, you've just been the victim of something called Anchoring Bias. Clearly, that jar doesn't contain more than a few hundred M&Ms, but for some of you, after seeing me mention a few numbers in the high range, your brain won't let you forget those numbers.

When I ask you to guess the new number, although you could just use common sense and get a much closer number, you're going to artificially inflate it in your head. You may not have guessed over 1000, but you definitely guessed big, much bigger than you would have had I not mentioned anything.

This is the premise of Anchoring Bias. Stores use this all the time. You know sales? You get 20% off this shirt! Guess what? They marked that shirt up 20% before taking 20% off. This inflates the perceived value of the items. They try to anchor you to higher numbers, so you feel good about the lower number. Walmart's price cuts do this all the time. A lot of discount stores like Big Lots do this as well, posting the "real" price they made up next to the price they're giving you. Amazon also loves doing this too. It's really everywhere.

So, what does a chapter about Anchoring Bias have to do with writing? Let's talk about the Anchoring Bias you yourself experience when you're writing. You may not have realized this was even a thing, but leave it to old Whatsawhizzer to make every part of the writing experience more complicated.

One of my most popular chapters on Wattpad 101 is the "How Long Should my Chapter Be?" chapter. Despite I gave a rather wide range for this and even gave the freedom to widen that even more, I still get probably about 3 comments a week from people who inform me how big their chapters are.

In particular, when someone finds the numbers I offer are far outside the range they write, they are often a bit shellshocked. With a lot of amateur artists, they start writing at a certain size, and the more they write at that size, the more they begin to think that size is the normal.

You'll find artists who think 1000 words is a long chapter, and can't even contemplate writing a 3000-word chapter. While some of these people just struggle to write period, there are also plenty who can easily pop out 3 1000-word chapters, but when it comes to 1 3000 word chapter, it seems like climbing a mountain. This is the kind of Anchoring I'm talking about.

There are many people out there who say they write as long as they want, that every chapter is exactly as long as it needs to be, and that chapter sizes are arbitrary. If they need a 500-word chapter, it's 500. If they need a 5000-word chapter, it's 5000 words. I've warned in the past that being this arbitrary will often make a story come off as extremely unbalanced. It will confuse and catch your readers off guard, and make it more difficult to read as your chapters maintain no kind of consistency. Every chapter doesn't need to be the same size, but there should be an average.

There is good news though. Even if you think you just write sizes arbitrarily, and it's all a cathartic part of the process, guess what? You're still being influenced by Anchoring Bias! What you chose to write last time will naturally affect how you write on this one, and what you write on this one will influence how you're able to write the next one. So, how does this affect your writing? Well, first, I'll give you an example of how it affects me.

I've personally had to deal with this kind of problem recently. When I first started writing, I didn't have particular goals when I wrote chapters. I started with whatever, and as I got more into the story, my original 2000-word chapters grew into sometimes 5000- or 6000-word chapters. I eventually started writing a book where every chapter was 4000 words, and at its top, I popped out 3 chapters a week.

Slowly, over time, an increase in the number of different stories I wrote as well as a bit of exhaustion over the large chapters, and that book not only decreased to once a week, but it became increasingly difficult to pump out even 1 4000-word chapter.

Part of this reason is I started to write a story that I released daily. The chapters were only 500 words long, but to make up for it, I'd write 3 of them a day. Yet, little did I realize, I was anchoring myself to increasingly smaller and smaller chapters.

Nowadays, most of my stories are 2000 words. I have some stories that aim for even smaller. This isn't necessarily an awful thing. My release schedule is insane. I write over 100,000 words a month, so even with smaller chapters, I'm releasing more often. 2000 words is also a perfectly acceptable size for chapters, and I still do have some works that I've set at 3000. However, when it comes to those 4000-6000-word chapters I used to write in my hey-day, even if I wanted to, I find them a struggle.

The idea of writing 3 4000-word chapters a week? I just couldn't imagine doing it. Yet, at the time, it wasn't that hard at all.

This is the effect anchoring had on me. If I had gone the other direction, writing increasingly giant chapters, then it would have gone the other direction. I'd have found 1000-word chapters appallingly short (and let's be honest, there was a time when I did). Of course, by the pure nature of the beast, it's easier to write 500-word chapters quickly, than 10,000-word chapters. In the past, I have put out a few 10-15k-word chapters, but they come with increasing rarity.

How does this affect you? It's just something to be aware of. Have you noticed you'll write your first chapter a certain size, and then each subsequent chapter either grows larger, or smaller? That's anchoring. You may think you're just "writing until it's done", but we as humans have these stupid things called brains that never quite work right.

By being aware of Anchoring bias, you can understand why you make the decisions you make, and possibly work on ways to break free of them. Try writing a long chapter every once in a while. Having trouble getting the word count up on your favorite story... write something else, something dumb and easy, that you can easily sprint 5000 words of crap on. Write a few of these 5000-word chapters, then return to your previous writing. I bet that the 1000-word chapter you were struggling with now seems laughably easy!

Honestly, there is a lot of fun things to learn from our flawed brains, as they are always tricking us. Such as the good old Cambridge study trick... you probably know this, but it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. You have to wonder how many words of your story your readers are actually reading.

Let's flip this anchoring bias thing the other way.

In the same way you're anchor biased when writing, your readers are anchor biased when reading. Let's say you release a chapter every day for two months. Then, you catch up with your writing, and have to drop to one a week. Suddenly, all your readers are pissed at you. Once a week! You barely release at all! What you don't know is write after they wrote that scathing rant, they go to another book series that releases once a month, and they don't complain a lick.

Anchoring Bias. It just goes to show you... never give your fans what they want! A good reason not to do mass releases, no matter how much they beg for them. You think you're doing your fans a great service, but you're really just shooting yourself in the foot.

This Anchoring Bias can be used in other ways too. If your book contains numbers, at some point, Anchoring bias plays an important role. By using it skillfully you can subtly altar the perception of your readers. Notice how we can watch an action story, and the main character can blow away like hundreds of bad guys? You're all like, Yeah! Awesome! However, if you stop to think about it, isn't he a mass murderer? Imagine any headline with "Guy shoots 100 people dead." that gives you a heroic image. Yet, these kind of body counts we've become accustomed to.

Using this kind of logic skillfully, you could make a girl seem better or worse. Notice how in Friends, or if you were born later, Big Bang Theory... those people have dated like 50 people each by the end of the show... and slept with at least half of them? How many of you have 30 sexual partners? Well, you don't notice those kinds of things in shows, but, they might come off as extreme in a book... that is, unless you anchor people ahead of time into finding those numbers acceptable.

I've said in the past that the world you write doesn't have to fit our world and our rules. You can have everyone be 7 feet tall, supernaturally beautiful, or possess superhero like strength. As long as these things make sense within this world and fit it, then people will accept these things. One such tool that will allow this is using Anchoring to your advantage. By showing a "giant" at twenty feet or calling a 6-foot tall person short, suddenly 7-feet doesn't seem so tall.

The reason it worked out so well in Friends is because everyone in the show dated that much, so it never stood out as strange for the world built. If only one character dates this much, and then the other characters point it out, the character could be sleeping with the same number of people, but suddenly, your perception of that character is completely different. Barney from How I Met My Mother might fit that. (I actually never watched that show, so I'm guessing)

So, there's one more tool in your arsenal. It's just another way to play with people's expectations, like all of you who expected me to tell you how many M&Ms are in the jar at the end of this. I have no clue. I ripped the image from google. Deal with it. By the way, $1000 is an amount of money. Now go donate on my Patreon.