: Re: Improving my story opening? I'm writing a story about a woman driving cross-country in search of her childhood home. There, she discovers the small town has grown to a suburban sprawl, and she's

@Courtney562

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Ignoring content, a few things stand out.
One, you shift tenses. You say "Grace isn't sure..." and then "Grace came upon...". Stick to one tense. If it were me, and you're already going for a distant POV, past tense might be my choice, but that's up to you.
Two, you have a few extraneous commas in your compound verbal phrases in the first paragraph.

... And, of course, things have changed. Highway 9 now avoids towns it
used to pass right through and curves in places she remembers being
straight. Saltwater Pond is now a mere puddle and has more roads
leading to it than she remembers.

Removing them keeps the reader from pausing unnaturally.
Three, as a small thing, there's a bit of repetition that might could be eliminated. If you go on to describe changes, and you're not trying to use a deep POV where the character is internally reflecting on "my, my, how things have changed!", you can just cut that line. You can also cut out the "in fact" for the same reason.

When Grace goes looking for the Woodbridge's house, in Gardner Valley,
it's been years since she was in this part of the country. Highway 9 now avoids towns it used to pass right through and curves in places she remembers being
straight. Saltwater Pond is now a mere puddle and has more roads
leading to it than she remembers. She doesn't remember any
roads, just a mock gravel path looping lazily around its borders.

But, ultimately, these are little things. I think that what your opening paragraphs may be missing is a real hook. Lots of places change, and the reader doesn't know about this place or have any reason to be invested yet. This is also a bit of a trope on its own as a beginning: a character stuck in a car on their way to something that'll help kick off the plot.
What you could try to do is obscure why Grace is having trouble finding things. She's looking for her childhood home, but the reader doesn't know that. I don't know her character, but if she's desperately trying to find something that she can't grasp anymore, there'd be anger and resentment that might show up at red lights she almost runs, stop signs she almost misses, and other drivers' dismay that someone's going too slow in the left lane because they're trying to ask Siri how far away they are. These are more emotional hooks. The reader has to decide whether they want or suspect Grace will be in an accident. These scenes show her lost, and it'd be up to you later to explain why.

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