Hmm. THIS IS HARD. There have been a few periods in my life where I have made a very deliberate, furious effort to improve my writing in a particular direction, usually because of being impressed by someone or something. Actually, one of these was a deliberate effort to improve my RP, which bled over into my prose remarkably.
These days I think about it at the beginning of any given story, because I have a few different 'settings'; very lyrical, very clinical, plot-and-dialogue-with-occasional-humorous-or-metaphorical-bits, and what I suppose is my general style (a more natural-feeling combination of everything). I probably don't alter my style to suit a character's voice as much as I should, sometimes, but usually me expressing things the way I want them to be expressed is more important than worrying about if a person would have that word in their vocabulary.
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These days I think about it at the beginning of any given story, because I have a few different 'settings'; very lyrical, very clinical, plot-and-dialogue-with-occasional-humorous-or-metaphorical-bits, and what I suppose is my general style (a more natural-feeling combination of everything). I probably don't alter my style to suit a character's voice as much as I should, sometimes, but usually me expressing things the way I want them to be expressed is more important than worrying about if a person would have that word in their vocabulary.
Is that the kind of answer you were looking for?