Children’s Author Greg Soros on What Characters Must Learn
Children’s author Greg Soros has spent more than fifteen years writing for young readers, and in that time he has settled on a question he considers more useful than the one most writers start with. Rather than asking what a character wants, Soros asks what that character needs to learn.
Young readers, he argues, are quick to notice the difference. A character who simply moves through a series of events feels hollow to them, while one who changes because of what happens feels real. That distinction guides nearly every choice Greg Soros makes when building a story from the ground up.
Growth Over Plot
Soros draws on research into child development to shape characters who face genuine difficulty rather than manufactured obstacles. Anxiety, friendship trouble, and the sense of being different from one’s peers show up often in his work, paired with the resilience children bring to solving their own problems.
Getting that balance right, he says, means honoring both the struggle and the child’s capacity to work through it. Greg Soros treats this as a shared responsibility between author and reader rather than something imposed from outside the story.
Writing for Different Ages
The approach shifts depending on audience. A picture book reader processes emotional material differently than a child working through early chapter books, and Greg Soros pays close attention to those developmental gaps rather than applying one formula across age groups.
That attention extends to how children actually read, not just what they read. Soros consults research on comprehension and emotional processing to make sure a story lands the way it was intended, adjusting pacing and vocabulary as needed for each stage of reading.
The result, according to Soros, is fiction that treats young readers as capable of real emotional insight. His characters are not vehicles for a lesson so much as people learning something true, which he considers the actual engine of a story worth telling. Refer to this article to learn more.
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