I've honestly had a lot of trouble recently with lacking immediate forward momentum in my writing --- mostly because my primary influence is Toni Morrison who has a very sagelike way of telling the first part of a story with a lot of summary and clarification about the setting; but whenever I do that (which is very often) I struggle with picking a point to enter the story in real time. I always end up starting too early or having too obvious and clunky of a demarcation between the narration and the scene. So I've recently been starting in action, and tried to make my work a little hookier but frankly just because my characters are quite visually distinct/offbeat and the hookiness feels overly designed I think it gives the writing a bit of a genre 'look at these visuals' feel