When it comes to submitting your work, the brutal truth is that you've only got about five pages to rev up your reader's enthusiasm before she puts it down and goes for the next submission.
If your story hasn't started on the first pages, then you're already at a disadvantage-not because what you're doing is necessarily bad, but because you have to face the reality that while your own amazing story might really pick up on page fifteen, other people are starting their amazing stories on page one. Whose book would you rather read?
Allow me to present a few very rudimentary techniques to help you make sure your first five pages will stand out in a crowd:
Introduce conflict in the first line whenever possible. This doesn't mean you have to introduce main conflict, but you do have to introduce some kind of intermediate conflict to pull your readers into the scene and then, the story.
Ground your scene in a physical space. If a reader can sink her teeth into your setting, you have the advantage of making her respond emotionally to what you're writing.
Avoid "musing" in your opening scene. Often, a submission will open with a solid point of intermediate conflict (like, our hero has broken his ankle on a deserted hiking trial and it's about to storm), but then, the scene stalls as the hero begins to muse, prodigiously, to himself (we read long passages about our hero's childhood, his reasons for not finding a good woman, how he came to be stranded on this hiking trail, etc.). This is a typical way to sneak in a character's backstory, but it slows down the action. If you can, incorporate backstory only when it is relevant to the immediate conflict. Otherwise, there's no reason our hero should be "musing" about his relationships with women or his childhood when in fact, he should be trying to seek shelter.
Use strategic adjective and adverbs. Often, one single, well-chosen word can replace strings of adjectives. In the first five pages, every word should have a strategy behind it; every word counts.
Get your hero and heroine together fast. New writers need every advantage they can get, so if you're writing romance, get the romance off the ground in the first five pages. If you're new, you have to write that much more competitively. Start your story ASAP.
