Sometimes when I read my own work, I feel like I seem to rely more on description and action, and there's a lot of he did this, they did that. I understand the old adage of "Read more, and write more." I read every single day, and I write every single day, without fail. However, I'm interested in any particular way I could improve my prose overall. I'd prefer it to be tighter, flowery, maybe, and much more poetical or able to encompass description in a consistently better way. I've been copyworking a lot too, I'm currently about a third of the way through Bradbury's Something Wicked and it has kind of helped me a little. I'm more interested all your opinions, or ways to study and improve.
It sounds like you're doing a lot of the right things. After copying you should emulate—meaning write like that author, but without copying. This requires that you pay attention to how they're doing what they do. What are some of the typical things Bradbury does that make his porose sound more poetic? Figure some of them out and write that way yourself, trying to sound like him. Do this with several writers, so you don't get stuck sounding like one of them all the time. As you go forward the writing should start to meld together to some extent and not sound like any of them anymore, but it's you taking on some of the elements of each of them, probably in modified form. Once you're just writing and not trying to emulate anybody anymore you should find you can use many of those techniques now, but it doesn't sound like them anymore. They become your techniques, available to use when you want to. Another approach is to study some of the techniques that are both literary and poetic. Actually most poetic devices are also literary, as long as we're not talking about rhyme and meter. Actually it's not a bad idea to study those as well for a while, but obviously you won't use them directly in prose. You can use rhyme, but it tends to sound better when it's not end rhyme. Play around with techniques of half-rhyme/slant rhyme etc. And probably the biggest thing I recommend is freewriting. Not for everything, just some of it. But it makes a huge difference when your'e just playing around and you won't be showing the results to anybody. it frees you up to mess around and try out all kinds of things. Deliberatly get crazy and weird with it in various ways—write fast and don't worry if you misspell things or make mistakes—leave them and keep going. I do this a lot for warmups before I set in to do my writing for the way, maybe ten minutes or more if you feel like it. If you catch yourself doing the same things too often make yourself change it. Freewriting is a good time to try out some of those poetic techniques. This looks like a good page on literary/poetic devices: 12 Literary Devices in Poetry: Identifying Poetic Devices But if you do some searches you can find many more.
I did a massive poetry thread on my blog where I delved into poetic prose for a good long while: Poetry/Romanticism thread pg 4 It starts way down near the bottom—the last two posts on the page—and it continues for a few pages, I couldn't tell you how many. If it grabs your interest, just read till it no longer does. On the following page I get into the Lyrical Novel, which uses a lot of this stuff.
