Study materials
Two sentences describe the same room. The second reads like the opening of a story, and the reason is the word order.
A portrait of her grandfather hung on the wall.
On the wall hung a portrait of her grandfather.
In the second sentence the place phrase moved to the front and the verb went before the subject. This is not negative inversion: no auxiliary is needed, the lexical verb itself moves.
Two principles that govern the order
An English sentence is built on more than subject plus predicate. Two information principles work on top of that frame.
The first: what is known comes first, what is new comes last. The second: what is heavy comes last, what is light comes first.
A man we had met at the conference last spring came in.
In came a man we had met at the conference last spring.
That is why inversion and fronting are not decorations. They rebalance a sentence when ordinary order puts the new or the heavy element in the wrong place.
Locative inversion
When a sentence opens with a phrase of place or direction, the verb can move in front of the subject. No auxiliary is needed here: the lexical verb itself moves.
On the wall hung a portrait of her grandfather.
Down the road came a procession.
The pattern works with a small group of verbs: be, come, go, stand, sit, lie, hang, appear. They all describe position or appearance.
And one hard restriction: the subject must be a noun. With a pronoun there is no inversion.
Down the road came he. → Down the road he came.
What it is for in a text
Locative inversion introduces a new object into a scene. The place is already known to the reader; what turns out to be there is new, and it lands at the end of the sentence.
We stopped at the corner. Opposite stood a small church.
That is why the construction is so common in description and in fiction. In a business letter it would be out of place.
The mistakes everyone makes
The first is inverting with a pronoun.
Into the room came she. → Into the room she came.
The second is calling in an auxiliary.
On the wall did hang a portrait. → On the wall hung a portrait.
The third is taking a verb from outside the group.
On the table ate the guests. → The guests ate at the table.
All three are caught by two questions. Is this verb about appearance or position? And is the subject a noun rather than a pronoun?
Try it right now
Describe the room you are in now in English in three sentences. Build one of them with locative inversion.
Then reread the paragraph and check that the new information really landed at the end of the sentence.