Sep 08, 2025 Character Clinic

When your deuteragonist should be your protagonist

Have you ever watched a show that made you go, "Wow, why isn't this one the main character?!" Same.

The first chapter of Jessica Brody's Save the Cat! Writes a Novel asks you to think about whether or not you're writing the right protagonist, to which I immediately scoffed at. Of course I have the right protagonist! How else could I be averaging 12,000 words a month?

Turns out, I was in denial. The very first exercise in this book reminded me of why I was writing this story in the first place. It starts with these questions:

What is your hero's big internal flaw; their "shard of glass" that manifests into bigger problems?
How is this problem affecting your hero's life/world?
What is causing this internal problem?
At the start of the novel, what does your hero want externally? How has the hero been actively pursuing this goal?
What haven't they achieved it yet?
What life lesson would truly fix their life?

I filled out these questions for my main character, a cunning witch who can command time and is busy rallying fellow witches to join the resistance. She sounds really cool on paper, I love her personality, and she has fantastic chemistry with the rest of her coven as well as the deuteragonist of the story, Lukas.

My problem, though, was that this character's internal problems paled in comparison with her deuteragonist's:

	Tavi (Protag)	Lukas (Deut)
Big flaw:	savior complex	lost the will to live
Consequence:	intentionally put a target on her back	hunts witches to keep his former boss away from his son
Cause of problem:	wants to prevent other witches from untimely deaths like her friend's	drowning in guilt for what trying to leave the first time did to his family
External goal:	inspire witches to join the resistance	apprehend Tavi for research
Stuck because:	her newest strategist is too unconventional for her team's liking	he's required to turn her in to the authorities instead
True lesson:	learning not to take everyone's critiques at face value	learning to trust and rely on other people

You could kind of just...stop at the first line, huh. Wanting to be a hero vs. regaining the will to live?

Lukas needed to be the protag all along. And the worst part about this realization was the fact that I should've seen it coming.

I mean, come on; this story started as a fanfic!

I stole shamelessly from the motivations and backstory to Munehisa Iwai to create Lukas Otani, a "retired" mobster specializing in witch trafficking nanotechnology. When you first meet him, he comes off as a cold-blooded wolf on the hunt, rumored to keep particularly interesting witches for himself rather than turning them into the SCU. What does he do with them? Where do they go when he's done with them? Nobody knows. The protagonist goes out of her way to build a reputation too large for Lukas to ignore in hopes of smoking him out in a last-ditch effort to negotiate. The hunter hunts the hunted; two smartasses studying one another like their lives depend on it.

I absolutely love their dynamic, and couldn't wait for the scenes where they finally meet one another and begin the game. But I couldn't help but notice that every scene with Lukas in it shined. Tavi's scenes were good, sometimes even great. She has noble motivations and a lot to lose...on paper.

But she didn't have the same desperate gravitas sticking to her the way Lukas did. He had atoning to do, an estranged wife to find, and a child to raise. He had a secret passion he'd been pursuing under everyone's noses his whole life. And he had a job that would raze everything he cared about to the ground if he ever tried being honest. They'd done it before, and they'll definitely do it again. We don't know it when we first meet him, but Lukas is well and truly stuck.

And that's why writing his scenes feel so damn golden. He is unmistakably the villain in Chapter One, but I want people to root for him. I want you to want him to be redeemable. So of course he's got to be the protagonist — even if you don't like him right away, you're going to get into his head. It's going to be intensely uncomfortable, but I promise the payoff will be tremendous.

I can't promise that with Tavi. She has a movement to lead, and she needs his help, even though he couldn't be more of an enemy to her if he tried.

Starting over isn't so bad

I am going to have to make some rewrites, but it's not the end of the world.

I initially wanted to write Lukas into the story with no POV whatsoever — just a roving threat for the main coven to be constantly aware of — but I wasn't having fun writing it that way, and I doubt it would have been fun to read, either.

If dropping a few thousand words is all I need to do to write it a better way, contrasting "fearsome witch hunter" with "overwhelmed single dad" so you can slowly learn the villains' motivations before the heroes do...isn't that more fun for everyone?

I'll have some character designs up this week on the channel!