1. Beginnings

Starting inside a scene is very different to approaching it slowly from outside. There’s a special verbal knack to presenting it as the characters experience it.

In real life, if you’re describing a room in a house to someone who hasn’t been there, you say things like:

There’s a long table …
and a painting of a landscape …
and a green carpet …

Similarly with the 19th century novel:

A small village…
a family that …

Note the ‘a’s, indefinite articles—not ‘the’s.

You move to the definite article only after you’ve introduced these things:

There’s a long table and a vase of chrysanthemums on the table …

When you start a novel inside a scene, though, you use the rather than a, because the characters experience these things as already known and familiar. It’s a sort of pretence that the reader enters into.

She paced up and down on the green carpet …
the table was covered in dust, as usual …

This isn’t exactly a helpful tip—living and reading in the 21st century, any author will do it automatically. Interesting, though.