So you just started an account... Or maybe you've been here a while and you just aren't getting a feel for things. Well Dorian is here to help you out! Here is an ongoing guide and the tricks of the trade. How to get followers, how to critique work...
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.
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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.
