Advice on Beginnings

Absolute Write Watercooler is a wealth of info and advice for those of us trying to get our stories finished, polished and published. These people are hardcore. One guy, JamesARitchie, strives for averaging 31,250 words per month, or 7,212 words per week.

That's 1,660 words per day. Yikes!

He says that gives him weekends off, two vacations per year of two weeks each, and a week off at Christmas. (Why I am not this dedicated?)

Another moderator, blackbird, gives a piece of advice to a newbie on Beginnings:

• Read your sentences aloud. Then go read aloud the beginning paragraph of Ursula K. LeGuin's A Wizard of Earthsea, Ray Bradbury's initial intro to The October Country or the opening paragraph of Bradbury's "Ylla" from The Martian Chronicles. All are fairly complex, but still direct and clear and carefully constructed."

• Understand the virtue and value of a well-controlled POV.
• Strive in your narration first for clarity. Every sentence needs a focus, a core that expresses as best possible what you want to say. 
• Dont' get mired in the swamp of embellishment. Dependent clauses, piled one after another, are not your friends. Sentences depend for their strength upon verbs and nouns, not adjectives an adverbs and participial and prepositional phrases
• Pay attention to precision in word usage. Understand what every word means in context of the prose, and what that conveys to a reader