Your First Idea Is Almost Never Your Best One

You're writing a story and you need someone to be an antagonist. FBI agents show up in your head immediately. They know about the aliens, they're part of the cover-up, they exist to suppress truth and serve as obstacles to the protagonist.

That's not a bad idea. It's the most available idea. And the ease of imagining it says nothing about whether it's right for your specific story.

The option that arrives first in your head is always the one you've been most exposed to. That's true for story elements, product features, technical architecture, and what to make for dinner. The first idea feels right because it's familiar, not because it fits. Something that feels obvious and natural is very hard to question. So most people don't.

The Cliche Isn't the Element

Here's the part most people get wrong. The problem is almost never the element itself. It's that every dimension of the implementation matches the default.

FBI agents in a UFO story aren't inherently a cliche. FBI agents who know about the aliens, are part of the cover-up, exist to suppress truth, and serve as obstacles to the protagonist — that's a cliche. Every axis matches the expected pattern.

But, FBI agents who don't know about the aliens? Who are investigating a missing persons case that happens to intersect with your plot? Who are antagonists because the protagonists seem connected to their case and won't explain why? Same element. Completely different on every other axis. Feels fresh.

The cliche lives in the combination, not the component. Change any single axis — what the element knows, what it wants, what role it plays, how it relates to the main situation — and the same familiar piece becomes something people haven't seen before.

This Works Everywhere

I originally developed this thinking for fiction, but it applies to every domain where default patterns dominate.

Product design is full of this. The first feature set that comes to mind for a new app is whatever the market leader does. A team building a project management tool defaults to Jira's feature set — not because those features serve their specific users, but because those features are the most available. The features know what product they're in: Jira. They don't know what product you're building. And, just like the FBI agents, the feature itself might be fine. But, does it serve the same function in your context? Is the role it plays the same? Is the user's relationship to it the same? When every axis matches the market leader, you haven't designed a product. You've copied one.

How to Get Past It

The approach I use is simple. List the defaults. Don't fight them, don't pretend they didn't show up. Write down every obvious option. Get them out of your head and onto paper where you can look at them instead of being guided by them.

Then figure out what job each default is actually doing. Every cliche and every default exists because it accomplishes something. The FBI cover-up accomplishes "create antagonism." The Jira feature set accomplishes "manage work items." The function — what it's doing — is usually legitimate. The form — how it does it — is the part that's defaulting.

Once you know the job, you can fill it differently. What else creates antagonism? What else manages work items? Now you're actually designing instead of accepting the first delivery from your pattern-matching brain.

The test I keep coming back to: does this element know what story it's in? Does this solution know what problem it's solving? Or does it exist because it's the version I've been most exposed to?

Making Conscious Choices

None of this means defaults are always wrong. Sometimes the obvious answer IS the right answer. Sometimes FBI agents really are part of the cover-up and that's exactly what the story needs.

The point isn't to avoid familiar elements. It's to choose them consciously instead of adopting them because they showed up first and felt right due to sheer repetition.

The ease of imagining something says nothing about its fit. First ideas are statistically probable. Best ideas are specific to your situation, and they almost never arrive first.