How (not) to Start a Novel

This came to me while I was sleeping. Never start a novel or story with an abstraction. I'm already losing the words I was reading, but it was a novel someone had given me in my dream to edit and evaluate. They had started this way:

"Spring is a season that never reflects."

Or something like that. I think they used a bigger synonym for "reflects", but so much of my dream was trying to come up with a better word that I forgot the original.

I'll start with the obvious, and change to

"Spring never reflects."

losing some of the rhythmic weight of the sentence, but to be honest, that was dead
weight to start, and anything it did for the sentence was artificial.

I tried many times to rework the sentence into a concept that would be a suitable start for a novel, but in the end, the concept itself is simply a weak way to start.

Here are a few ideas I had for better starts for a novel:

"I have red hair and freckles."

"Fred stood in front of a door marked Sprinkler and Winkler Attorneys at Law."

"The petunias were blooming early that spring." (Do petunias bloom in the spring? who cares.)

I'm even thinking a novel could do without a verb in its opening. You see this a lot in stage directions and screenplays:

"A man on the edge of a precipice, a rope just out of his reach."

These are just some ideas from someone who actually has never written novels, but this came to me in my sleep, so I can't consciously be held responsible if there is or is not any wisdom in the idea. At the same time, what I could do now if I was a responsible person, would be to go do some research on novelistic beginnings, which wouldn't take long at all, and determine what the "great novelists" do. Thing is, even the greats don't necessarily have a great first sentence.

Still, the first sentence is probably the part of the novel that every published novel actually gets right, because so much attention is paid to it, and it's where the first readers (editors) are at their freshest and most ready to make decisions.

Anyways, my rule of thumb is therefore "never start a novel with an abstraction." "No, not even once. There are no exceptions, as there are in the usual prohibition about abstractions throughout written art. Absolutely never start a novel or a short story with an abstraction."

Now, plays are different, because you do have a captive audience. No one is going to walk out of the play based on the first line of dialogue. But it would still be odd to start a play with a character saying "Spring is a season that never reflects." You'd have to concretize it pretty quickly, or else leave it as an unexplained throw-away postmodern line, possibly delivered by a crazy person.