People mean different things when they say "writer," and it's worthwhile untangling a few different types.<p>* Writers who make a living writing<p>* Writers who don't (yet)<p>* Fiction writers: Novelists and short-story writers<p>* Poets<p>* Journalists: reporters, war correspondents, editors<p>* Bloggers<p>* Corporate: Technical writers, Marketing copy writers, etc.<p>* Academics all stripes<p>These categories aren't mutually exclusive, but they each represent a different type of writing, which itself requires a different practice, approach or method.<p>There are, in fact, many handbooks for being a writer, and almost all of them are written to serve a particular type of writer and not others.<p>The creative writing departments of America have produced piles of writing about writing (about writing -- gaah ... self-referential recursion! No one escapes a medium describing itself.).<p>Some of the classics are:<p>* The Elements of Style - Strunk and White<p>* Politics and the English Language - Orwell
<a href="https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm</a><p>* Hemingway on Writing
<a href="https://www.scribd.com/doc/156100470/Ernest-Hemingway-on-Writing" rel="nofollow">https://www.scribd.com/doc/156100470/Ernest-Hemingway-on-Wri...</a><p>* Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style - Erasmus (the opposite of Strunk...)<p>* And so on...<p>The best handbook of all, though is simply the study of great writers whose work you love, as the author points out. Anyone serious about fiction or prose should dive into the 19th-century Russian and French novelists, Virginia Woolf, an annotated Shakespeare, etc. It's all there just waiting for us. In that sense, every piece of good writing is a handbook on writing.<p>(Fwiw, I made a living as a reporter and editor for about 10 years.)