Children’s book Author Greg Soros has spent more than fifteen years writing for young readers, and over that time he has settled on a single question that guides every character he creates. It is not what the character wants. It is what the character needs to learn. That distinction, Soros says, separates books that simply move through events from books that stay with a child long after the last page.
“The most important question isn’t ‘What does my character want?’ but rather ‘What does my character need to learn?’” Soros explains. He argues that young readers notice the difference immediately, even if they could not put it into words themselves. “Young readers are incredibly perceptive. They can sense when a character is just moving through a plot versus when that character is genuinely growing.”
Writing Growth Instead of Plot
For Greg Soros, growth has to be earned through the story rather than announced at the end of it. A character who learns something should show that change through choices and reactions, not through a tidy summary in the final chapter. Author Greg Soros describes this as a process that borrows from research into how children actually develop emotionally, paired with the sense of wonder that keeps a story fun to read.
He is careful to point out that real struggles belong in children’s fiction. Kids deal with anxiety, arguments with friends, and the feeling of being different from everyone around them, and Soros believes stories should reflect that honestly while still showing a path forward. Soros credits young readers with more resilience than adults often assume, and he sees the author’s job as respecting both the difficulty of those experiences and a child’s ability to work through them. In a recent Walker Magazine profile, he positioned that duality as central to how educators, parents and publishers approach early reading.
That balance changes depending on the audience. A picture book aimed at very young children calls for a different emotional vocabulary than a chapter book for a slightly older reader, and Soros pays close attention to how comprehension shifts across those stages before he starts shaping a character’s arc. Visit this page for more information.
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