How to begin a text

Really: just write, then revise. Nothing special about the beginning. What hung me up as a writer for much of my life was not realizing I should get a rough draft down instead of editing as I wrote.

We do use "better luck next time," so perhaps the translator is trying to be idiomatic.

(The Leidenfrost effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leidenfrost_effect))

I bought a infrared thermometer as a gadget, and have found it to be invaluable for cooking.

This tangles up a few seemingly related questions:

1. "How to begin writing a text." How do you get yourself going so you aren't stuck on a blank page?

2. "How to write the beginning of a text." What is the process you take to determine the first sentence of a piece of writing?

3. "How to begin a text." After you've gone through that process, what kind of opening sentence should you end up with?

The suggestion to just delete the first couple of sentences is an OK one. I think the important part is that it helps solve the first problem—how to get moving at all so you are past the blank page. And the key insight is to realize that everything is still mutable. Writing is not committing. Editing isn't either, for that matter. Only publishing is. Until then, it's all unfired clay and you can play with it to your heart's content.

I think deleting the first couple of sentences is a moderately OK suggestion for the second one. Deleting any sentences that don't carry weight is always a good thing, and the first few are likely to be unuseful. But there's a good change that the next few sentences need work too. In a first draft, every line is suspect.

I don't think the article tells you much about what a good first sentence looks like. I don't necessarily think it needs to have "useful content". When I write, especially for the web where attention spans are measured in nanoseconds, the entire goal of my first sentence is to get you to read the first paragraph. The goal of the first paragraph is to get you to read the first section. Then I start getting to the meat of the piece.

Often that means the first sentence is a hook. It may be deliberately emotional to get you excited about continuing to read. Or it may raise a question you want answered or claim to teach you something you want to know. Sometimes I just try to use interesting enough language or imagery to get you excited about the pure joy of reading.

Once I've done that, I've got a little more slack, a little more of your good faith, that I can then use to draw you through the rest of the work. If I'm trying to do something like explain how a garbage collector works, or describe a feature of a programming language you've never heard of, I need that initial burst of interest to get you to keep moving.

Then it's up to me to make the rest of the piece satisfying enough to be glad that I sucked you in.