What I think a lot of novice writers, and people giving advice to novice writers, often miss is that "hooking" your reader doesn't mean immediately assualting them with action. All it means is raising a question the reader wants to know the answer to.
For example, "The Wizard Hunters" opens with the line "It was nine o'clock at night and Tremaine was trying to find a way to kill herself that would bring in a verdict of natural causes in court, when someone banged on the door." Not much action - Tremaine is sitting in a dusty library reading books - but that line raises two immediate questions: 1, why is Tremaine trying to kill herself in a way that would be ruled "natural causes", and 2, who's banging on the door at 9pm?
Similarly, "Black Sun Rising", the first book of the Coldfire Trilogy, opens with the line "She wondered why she was afraid to go home." Again, the line raises multiple questions, inviting the reader to keep reading to learn the answers.
How can you not want to keep reading after that? While at the same time it’s still at the beginning, not assaulting you with action, etc
OTOH I think it's often appropriate to keep "mamma" in Italian movies and texts because it carries a huge amount of connotations, which "maman" doesn't.
Well it's not an accurate translation, 'my' create a distance between the narrator and the mother that you don't have in the original sentence.
You traduction is much more objective than what the author wrote.
- opening sentence of Iain Banks' The Crow Road
It's been a long time since last time I read it, but isn't this essentially the opening of the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy?
edit: yep, there's a prologue which gives you the broader scope https://www.amazon.com/Hitchhikers-Guide-Galaxy-Douglas-Adam...
Other things I find difficult about writing:
Ending chapters (I saw a really bad one once in the Broken Earth trilogy that was basically "[character] realized she had nothing more to say, so she walked away." I totally understood how the author got herself in that situation lol)
Making decisions on tropes. For example, say I'm writing a sci fi with a "rise of the machines" plot point (I am). What is the nature of those machines? Rampant AI in existent technology? Did it make war-bots? Or maybe multiple rampant AIs in autonomous bots? Etc. There's like fifty of these kinds of decisions I need to make in a book I'm working on now.
Writing dialogue that's interesting, but not campy, but realistic, but not drab.
Crystal’s character has writers block because he is fixated on a good first sentence setting the tone for the rest of the novel, and he never gets past line one.
That must have been driven by comments from initial readers, I suspect. Basically, some of the characters are rewriting the overall story of the series.
In game development, often you'll start with a random level from early-mid game, since that lets you playtest all of the gameplay. You then work forwards and return to the opening levels once the gameplay, art style etc. are all locked in and polished.
I wonder if some writers would benefit from a similar approach?
Funnily enough, there is a (French) Page 112 prize: https://www.prix-de-la-page-112.com/
I'd love to hear an author's perspective on this, if any of them notice it. My guess is that they stew on opening passages for years before writing, causing them to get a little neurotic about them, then eventually they settle down and write in a way that comes more naturally to them for the rest of the book.