First chapters suck · 6:27pm Jul 19th, 2012
Descriptive blogtitle is best blogtitle 
So, I'm guessing a fair number of you are wondering why there hasn't been a chapter one to BTE yet (either that or you want to know just who this Aquillo is and why he's lighting fires up in your grill* like an amateur arsonist). Fret not! It's on the way. Sometime-ish.
Basically, I hit a roadblock where the story became boring to read/write. I had to info-dump and get through a really, really boring scene because - and here's the kicker - I wanted it to be mundane. Anti-climatic. Turns out that means boring.
Who'da guessed?
Either way, block's over and I can put in a tenuous first chapter post date of around... Saturday? Yeah, let's try for Saturday. It's a good day.
Oh, and here's something a little bit extra just for bothering to click:
There! Two of the greatest things in life, all in one pic! Back to the future and Scoots: how could you possibly go -
Buck To The Future. Posted Twenty-One Weeks Ago. Never Got Past The First Chapter
Oh. Oh, goodness. I'll... I'll start writing right now, I swear.
*And by grill, I mean notification bar. Just so you don't start checking your barbeque or oven for... well, me.
Wait, what's BTE? How can I know about it if the first chapter isn't even up yet . . . ?
Yeah, first chapters can be rough. Beware of of infodumps and narrative summaries. Those killed the first chapters of my first two pony fics.
238689
>Narrative summaries
Funny you should mention that, seeing as my actual solution involves replacing the boring bit with a narrative summary...
As for the story itself, prologue's up here. Have fun (or not, s'up to you)
238740
Narrative summaries aren't necessarily bad. It's a matter of using them judiciously. The "show don't tell" rule should be rephrased as "show when you should and tell when you should," except that's not really helpful, especially since most new authors have more problem with telling too much rather than showing too much.
238754
I agree whole heartedly with the "show don't tell" rule being... ill advised at times. There's lots of circumstances where telling is better than showing, especially if you're trying to condense down something that needs to be in there but is relatively unimportant. Take "said Rainbow Dash", for example. That technically telling, but expanding it into showing does nothing for the scene, makes it annoying and clunky to read through and quickly exhausts both the writer and the reader's patience.
"Show don't tell" is a good rule of thumb, but it's a terrible law to live by.
238821
Biggest problem, I think, is the well-meaning proofreader who writes, "You're telling" in the margins; this might help an experienced writer who can use such a note to identify weak passages himself, but a newbie won't know the exact nature of the problem. It could be pedantic detail (listing every piece of furniture in a room), redundancy ("She screamed angrily"), excessive adverbs (often goes with redundancy), or a narrative passage that needs to be fleshed out with detail and description. All those get condensed into "telling."
238864
I think they mainly get condensed because a lot of people use it as a 'I don't like this sentence, but I can't quite say why' get out clause, and use it to make the writer re-write the sentence/passage. I know I've used it once when a writer was technically showing what each character was doing but wrote it in an almost list like fashion. I could justify it because he was technically 'telling' us what each character was doing in a really mechanical fashion (eg, sentence per character), but it wasn't really a case of show vs. tell in his writing style.
So yeah. I think it's thrown around a lot both because it's a genuine problem and also because it's in that wonderful place of 'just vague enough to do the trick'.