Speaking of Style...

[crime in the city v2]

Many great writers have very distinct 'styles.' Victor Hugo rambles for pages about politics, while Tolkien takes half a rainforest just to describe a rock. Many modern writers, like those who write the bland, teeny-bopper, young adult novels about wanne-be punk girls who just want to be popular, etc, etc all seem to have the same generic style. I know I want to have a writing style that people will be able to recognize. So, how does one go about doing this? Writing and writing and writing until something emerges? Finding a great writer whose style you admire and reading and reading and reading until you can replicate it?
Feel free to talk about the different styles of writers as well, or how you honed your particular style.

[Vega McLeod]

It shouldn't be about trying to replicate someone's else's style as much as it should be about finding your own. Instead of picking one particular author's work to study choose a bunch of authors with very differing styles to get a few ideas from all of them. Maybe take your favorite thing about the style (like Tolkein's descriptions) and try to work it in in your own way into your stories.

Also, be original and be unique. Show YOUR personality off through your writing. If you're off the wall and crazy and just out there then maybe let that glimmer through so people not only enjoy your work but maybe can get some idea as to what the mastermind behind the story is like. (I wonder if that came off as stupid as I felt it did sweatdrop )

I don't think my style's 'honed' just yet. I guess I focus primarily around the characters in my plot (Okay, so my characters have their own style). And my characters are never normal. Each of them has a personality you'll remember them by (mainly: they're all pretty eccentric.)

[Prairie_Fire]

I find that my style is a lot like Richard Brautigan. I sure this is partly due to the fact that I respect him greatly but I also respect him because I can understand his writing. So, in short my writing is like his because I believe I think like he does.

Not everyone has style. Look at J.K. Rowling, she can tell a good story but her writing is very bland and straight forward.

[wolfbynight]

i see nothing wrong in emulating others' styles
it is great practice and gives you the benefit of objectively looking at once scene via different sylized perspectives. it could do nothing but help

i tend to be very bland myself; i absolutely abhor describing things and i tend to want to make my reader very upset. sigh.

[Disgruntled Peony]

My style is, and will always be, a work in progress. You've read one of my stories, so you have a pretty good idea of what it is at this point in time (I tend to focus on dialogue and character thoughts/interaction more than description, since I'm not particularly great at it, and my stories tend to be very much character-related). Currently I'm working on upping my description skills and getting even more into characters' heads, because I've spent enough time working on screenplays that I'm somewhat out of practice with exploring a person's motivations in more than half-passing detail. That also gets me into the 'show, don't tell' thing, which I have a hard time working with on occasion.

Writers who have influenced my style most notably would be Orson Scott Card and Stephen Lawhead; there have been other influences, but those two are undoubtably the biggest.

Oh, and now that I think about it, writing stories specifically to be 'published' online has also influenced my style, since I seem most prone to writing short stories and clipping it up into short, concise (and generally uniform length) chapters at the moment. 3nodding I'm also big on cliffhangers at the end of each chapter. Force of habit from writing fanfics where you wanted to keep your reader's attention from chapter to chapter.

[Sgt Arashi Shippuu]

yeah

[Tast Dominingo]

Look at Charles Bukowski's Way of writing down there at my signiture.

[Tast Dominingo]

Iv been trying to use this way of writing. Sometimes it works.
And other times it wasn't so "Understanding."