Over at Pro-Blogger, Darren Prowse’s group writing project for December is Reviews and Predictions—looking back over last year or making predictions for next year in your personal blogging niche. I thought I might enter. Here’s mine.

My prediction—we will have a better chance of being published next year, and here’s why.

Calder plays online computer games. (We actually started a blog about it, but found we couldn’t keep up with all the blogging, so sadly, that one dropped by the wayside.) She mostly plays Runescape. She found, when she started, that a lot of people were extremely helpful. They gave advice, they gave her stuff, even went with her to show her how to do things. Now she’s an old-timer (I think the term is no longer a noob), she does the same for other people. As she says, people were decent enough to help her when she had no idea, it’s up to her to pass that on.

The fiction writer’s blogging community is a lot like that.

People help each other. They swap information, they share experiences. Not only that, people in the industry pass on valuable advice to us ‘noobs’, advice we can use to further our chances of attaining that ultimate goal—becoming published.

Take query letters for example. You can’t sell a book if you can’t write a good query, and a good query needs a hook. Yet most of us can’t write them.

We know what our story is about, we think it’s good, but can we describe it well enough to hook the agent who is reading the query? No.

The best way to learn what makes a good query is to compare what works with what doesn’t. The Crapstravaganza (Crapometer IV) that Miss Snark is running at present does exactly that. 700+ hooks from aspiring writing, designed to show what works for her as an agent, and what doesn’t. She’s up to 160, and less than 10% have made the grade. Believe me, it works. Seeing the bad hooks, interspersed with the occasional good one, really makes a difference. I know I am going to come away from this with a better query for Potion, and a better one for Barrain if it’s ever good enough to send it out. We’ve come a long way from the cringe-inducing days of the first draft of Barrain and the query for it that we sent off to Wizards of the Coast.

Miss Snark isn’t the only agent to comment on queries (but the Crapometer is far and away the most outstanding). She isn’t the only agent to blog.

Most agents don’t get much out of blogging, relatively speaking. A little publicity, potential for better clients in future. Given that she’s anonymous, Miss Snark doesn’t even get that. The agents do it to help others, and to share information. One agent—and I can’t find the quote sorry, or I’d attribute it to her—said that she blogs to help others, because so many people helped her when she was starting out.

Sound familiar?

One day we hope to be published authors. Whether we ever are or not, I like to think that other people reading our blog might find some value. They can take heart at some of the things we share—like just how bad a first draft can be, but if you believe in the story you can fix it; like how two people with totally different ideas can write together and make it work.

We’ll get there, with the help of the blogging community.