Style is like time or space - nearly impossible to explain without referring to itself. Go ahead and give it a whack: explain time without saying time, or some other variation like duration or span. Try explaining distance without saying "far."
This is the song that never ends...
Now try to come up with a better definition of literary style than "the use of literary tropes or techniques." This is a distillation of recurring definitions I've found across a collection of internet sources, each one of those in turn is either just as broad, or drives at one more narrow point in particular and sounds better, but doesn't necessarily mean any more - one of the better definitions of this type that I've heard explained style as "...the voice readers "hear" when they read your work," which is great, but I think tone and narration have that covered by themselves.
Style is everything present on the page - the word kind of sucks because in encompassing the whole mess of literary tropes and techniques, it ultimately means so much that it becomes meaningless. It's kind of like people who say "god is everything and everywhere," well, what's the point?
The point is that everyone can recognize style when they see it, so long as they have the slightest inclination to do so. Read Faulkner, and you know you're reading Faulkner. Read Hemmingway, and you know you're reading Hemmingway. Read Terry Pratchett, and you'll think that Douglas Adams is phoning it in under a pen name.
Choose the one on the right.
It's more than just what the writer says and the tone in which he says it. That's all well and good, but how does one get style? You'll know when you don't have it because people will tell you. They'll use words like "problematic," "inconsistent," or "crap sandwich."
You'll know for sure that you're developing a sense of style when someone reads 2 or more of your stories and says things like "I notice that," or "you tend to," but someone can get a sense of your style from just one story. Read one story by Carver or Joyce to see what I mean - while they certainly have distinctive tones to their work, there's more the distinction than just the way they sound.
Regular readers of this blog know that I consider there to be six elements of Fiction: character, plot, narration, dialogue, theme, and setting. Taking some famous author's, let's go element-by-element and find some distinctions.
1. Character
Flannery O'Connor and Sherwood Anderson populate their stories with ignorant grotesques, caricatures of archetypes. They are often metonymous and seldom self-aware. Characters in Auster's New York Trilogy are barely characters at all, existing mostly as names. Flaubert could throw plot to the wind so long as his characters remained truthful, complex, and convincing.
Ask yourself: Are my character's consistently living, breathing people? Is what my character's do and say more important than who they are?
2. Plot
Though the exact number is hotly contested, there do seem to be a finite number of plots swimming around. You could go through and explore every variation of man vs. man, man vs. nature, monkey vs. robot and so on, some (indeed, most) writers wind up with recurring action arks. Jack London was a pretty obvious man-vs-nature sort of guy, Kate Chopin had a good handle on woman-vs-society.
Ask Yourself: who keeps fighting whom? What are my protagonists usually up against? Why does this interest me, and why do I keep exploring this concept over others?
3. Narration
When you read Faulkner, you are going to spend most of your time being screamed at by an angry drunk who evidently broke the period key off his typewriter. When you read Carver, you'll barely know he's there. Some writers have no compunction about editorializing while others would not dare pass judgment on the unfolding action. Similarly, some schools of authorship reject ornate narration as so much "purple prose" while others heap lavish detail, alliterative flourishes, and dancing poesy on every nook and cranny.
Ask yourself: What do I sound like? Is my voice consistent? Do I trend towards one tense or another? one POV over another? Am I poetic or prosaic?
4. Dialogue
Few stories exist with no dialogue at all, but they're out there - think of Bradbury's There Will Come Soft Rains. Most stories do have people talking, and there's a lot of room for decision here. Do your character's speak in pointed monologues (Rand, Heinlein) or do they say little words that don't mean much (Mansfield, Stein). Also, don't let anyone tell you otherwise - there is no hard and fast rule for setting your dialogue.
"This," he said, "is a fine method."
- But this is the one that a lot of Moderns used, she said.
He added: colons get the point across too, and like the m-dash method is a lot less conspicuous than quotes.
tl:dr lol
Ask yourself: Why do my characters say what they say? Am I filling in space with spoken words? Do my spoken exchanges reveal something about the speaking characters? Does the dialogue move the plot forward? How are you setting your dialogue, and why?
5. Theme
This is the stickiest prospect for a writer to handle because criticism of theme is usually the privilege of the reader. Furthermore, themes don't usually develop until after a work is completed, and those themes can change as the society that receives them changes. Nevertheless, someone is going to grasp at theme in your work, so you should at the very least know how you're coming across in terms of the politics of gender, race, and class - these are the big three that people jump on first, and the three you must be prepared to have thrown back at you. How many times have you heard that Hemingway was a misogynist? That Fitzgerald was an elitist? That George Bush doesn't care about black people?
Ask Yourself: What kinds of people keep popping up in my work? Who is writ large on the page? Who is excluded? Do the black guys always die first, like in a bad horror movie? Why?
6. Setting
The action's got to happen somewhere. For my part, 80% of what I write gets set in rural Michigan. Don't know why, don't care why - stories just work out better that way. Joyce had a hard time getting out of Ireland, Hemingway may have written all over the world, but his character's almost always created little expat bubbles.
Ask yourself: Can I be considered an urban writer? A coastal writer? A transatlantic expat? Where is this action happening, and can it be set somewhere else, or would that destroy the whole narrative?
Basically exactly the same.
Some writer/teachers have produced some really great style guides, but the only way to really develop your own sense of style is to write, write, write. Tired advice, right? But it's the only thing that ever works. I hope the examples and questions up above are helpful to you, but if not - keep practicing. Remember, style doesn't mean rote consistency or some dedication to doing things a certain way: it also includes breaking the rules, especially your own rules, in a fresh and interesting manner.
This was a long one - man, did you really read down this far? I feel like there should be some sort of reward for your perseverance. Here, have an internet flashback:
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