endings
My sense is that if you develop an ear for a good rhythmic sentence, you're on your way. One of things I notice about people who are first getting started with creative writing is the tendency to try to stuff too much into a sentence. I once had (but can't find now) a one-page story by a student where every single sentence seemed to have an unnecessary and distracting tail -- mostly in the form of a prepositional phrase -- that could be (pardon the imagery) docked. When a sentence doesn't work for me one of the first things I look for is excess baggage. Sometimes it's fairly innocuous: He nodded his head. A bit longer: Marie was always forgetting to write down telephone numbers when she took messages for herself or other people.
I'll be looking for more examples of this, and tomorrow I'll move on to the subject of ending paragraphs.