You want your reader to fall in love with your opening. You need your reader to fall in love with your opening. It's arguably the most important part of any work because it's essential for getting the work read in the first place. Here's a prompt to help you hone the beginning, and a challenge to help you decide if your current beginning is the best possible one.

PROMPT: Write ten (or at least three) new variations (or entirely new reimaginings) of your first sentence.

You could just tweak the language, or you might try restarting in various different parts of the book. Write down an explanation for why each one would be the best beginning. Any reservations? Which one do you think you should go with? Do any of the alternates turn out to be important and useful, maybe as section or chapter openings later in the text?

If it's useful, stretch the task, enlarge it: Try out an alternate version or two of your first page or scene or stanza. Think about the order in which information is delivered. Is it chronological? Is there a temporal frame, perhaps with a wiser, later point of view at the beginning and end, and a flashback at the heart? If not chronological, what is the order?

Consider what would change if you started in an entirely different place, at a different time or with another setting. These changes might simply mean moving things around or writing new pages. You don't have to use these new starts, of course, but you can use them to learn more about how to shape your book.

Save the variations as a separate file or several files. Set them aside for a while before you decide where to start, or whether any of them might belong anywhere at all in your piece.

You could just as easily apply this prompt to an ending, or to the beginning or closing of any particular section, especially a crucial one.