I'll be the first to admit, I'm no stylist. Waxing poetic, constant symbolism, hefty use of figurative language? Not really the kind of thing I tend to do. I follow a few personal style guideline, the first rule of which is "if a word doesn't convey more necessary information than a more easily-understood synonym, it is usually better to go with the synonym", for example. My prose isn't exactly overflowing with stylization, artistry, or color, and I've always worried that was a sign I wasn't as passionate or as creative as I could be, but at the same time I don't feel like I enjoy writing any less than those people whose prose is very stylized. I've always considered myself a "plot and function"-first writer; emphasizing what I want to say over how I say it, and focusing on the explicit before the implicit. I try to introduce more figurative language, or fancy up my prose, or introduce more thematic symbolism, because that's what I've always associated with "better writing", but the result always feels less comfortable and more stilted than I like. Is this a strictly "inferior" stylistic choice, and does me being unable to adapt make my writing worse? Or am I worrying myself over something that isn't really as binary as I think?
Depends on what you're writing. Strip away the prose from Faulkner or McCarthy and there wouldn't be much left. Add flowery prose to Asimov and Clark and... well, that would probably be pretty annoying. All depends on your jam and the kind of readers you're trying to attract. Literary crowd wants one thing while dyed-in-the-wool genre fans want something else.
If it helps to know, my genre of choice is Golden Age-styled mysteries, the style of crime writing from about 1920 to 1950 which was unique in that it focused on the idea of presenting the crime as a convoluted puzzle and intellectual exercise to the reader, as opposed to a realistic depiction of murder. The reader is given all of the information, and challenged to solve the crime before the detective reveals the solution in the end of the book, and the crime is usually fantastically complex. Specifically, I deal with locked-room mysteries and impossible crimes: murders committed in rooms perfectly sealed from the inside; stabbings committed in virgin snow where the killer leaves no footprints; seemingly supernatural phenomena that, ostensibly, no human could be responsible for. The whole puzzle is figuring out how a seemingly impossible and illogical crime is entirely possible, by human means with no supernatural agency or science-fiction technology. Which, I suppose, answers my question as to which style is better...
