A number of the stories we've critiqued so far have been written in what I think of as a "high" or elevated style of diction. For whatever reason, this particular register (as Mai might say) seems to attract us-maybe because when it's done well it sounds authoritative, a style that cannot be denied. Maybe it's that years of literature classes from high school on have rubbed our faces in the voice of 19th century literature enough that we're obliged to try it for ourselves.
The problem is that what we remember high style to be while attempting it often isn't the case, and when we try to carry off that diction, we end up with a vague and lifeless version of it-in part because just by approaching it this way, we're acknowledging that it's something we're putting on. It's not our natural voice, but more like a role. It's like adopting the voice of King Lear for the duration of a story (there's a writing exercise for you...).
A similar thing occurred in the fantasy genre as the influence of J.R.R. Tolkien washed through-lots and lots of writers decided to write just like him. The problem is that they ended up writing with a diction that they *think* is Tolkien's but doesn't even come close. He was a linguist and he chose his words carefully to give the impression of a purple prose that in fact he didn't use--iIt's the "less is more" theory of voice. His imitators missed the subtlety, and as a result the fantasy genre has endured 40 years of some of the worst bleedin' prose ever written. (No doubt as a result of the popularity of Peter Jackson's films we can look forward to 40 years more, Oy gevald.)
For you who are applying a voice that comes down from Henry James, Elizabeth Bowen, Herman Melville, Tolstoy, through John Fowles and Dorothy Dunnett and other masters of the high road, there are some things you should bear in mind when analyzing what you've wrought.
First: Don't go drifting into abstract or meaningless verbiage merely because it sounds ever so highborn:
Example: "Her cheeks were thick and smooth and held a healthy natural red color. The heavy lines under them, her jowls, extended to the intersection of her lips and gave her a thick-lipped frown most of the time."
The first sentence starts out fine until you get to "and held a healthy natural red color." Suddenly we've banished clear description and switched to a phrasing that doesn't really describe clearly at all, draining the life from, say, a simpler "and glowed with health", which may be a cliche but at least provides a direct image without the "her cheeks held a red color" phrasing. Generally, cheeks only hold something if they're attached to chipmunks...
Second: Beware of shifts in your diction from standard (neutral) English to pseudo-elevated English or vice versa. The second sentence above is worse than the first, serving up weird detail-- "extended to the intersection of her lips"--followed at the end by a shift back to the colloquial with the qualification "most of the time." This writer isn't controlling his diction. The result is neither one thing nor the other. The writer, striking out for an elevated tone, is trying too hard to make something unique out of a language that's not his natural voice, and in the process loses concrete description (held a...red color) and fails to hang onto the tone (most of the time).
The uniqueness of your writing comes from your natural voice. Not from an artificial imposition of what you think high art, or "important" literature should be like. Don't get me wrong: You can use it--elevated diction like anything else is one device in your toolkit, available to you anytime you feel it serves your story. But you shouldn't write in a high style until you can tell real high style from mannered imitation. That means you really have to look closely at what the writers of that style are doing, sentence by sentence.
Here's an example of real elevated prose:
The morning was one peculiar to that coast. Everything was mute and calm, everything grey. The sea, though, undulated into long roods of swells, seemed fixed and was sleeked at the surface like waved lead that has cooled and set in the smelter's mould. The sky seemed a grey mantle. Flights of troubled grey fowl, kith and kin with flights of troubled grey vapours among which they were mixed, skimmed low and fitfully over the waters, as swallows over meadows before storms. Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come.
That's Herman Melville, for whom this voice was his natural. The language, the sentence structure, is complex, but none of this impedes the presentation of imagery, of details, and a cadence of somber weight, which conveys the impression of a landscape that's almost holding its breath. The surface of the ocean as waved lead is a great image.
With a pen or pencil you can mark/underline the beats, feel the weight of his language. It's ominous, powerful, with carefully chosen rhythms and very clear images.
Compare him to Isaak Dinesen, writing in her own very different high diction introduction to a traditional tale:
The big house stood as firmly rooted in the soil of Denmark as the peasants' huts, and was as faithfully allied to her four winds and her changing seasons, to her animal life, trees and flowers. Only its interests lay in a higher plane. Within the domain of the lime trees it was no longer cows, goats, and pigs on which the minds and the talk ran, but horses and dogs.
The wild fauna, the game of the land, that the peasant shook his fist at when he saw it on his young green rye or in his ripening wheat field, to the residents of the country houses were the main pursuit and the joy of existence.
The writing in the sky solemnly proclaimed continuance, a worldly immortality. The great country houses had held their ground through many generations. The families who lived in them revered the past as they honoured themselves, for the history of Denmark was their own history.
She is more abstract than Melville, but still sprinkled with images among her intellectual points and analogies. Note the cameralike distance she maintains from her subject; how she remains like a person standing in a gallery or museum, surveying and commenting upon a canvas from that distance.
Between just these two writers there's a lot of territory, all of it viable to write in. But again, to beat the horse absolutely dead, this is not an easy style to adopt; the fact that many of us are drawn to imitate it suggests that it strikes some sort of chord in us that no amount of dissuasion will deter. If you go there, then study closely what you've done, and be sure that what you've actually put down on paper is clear and consistent and under control.