Children’s author Greg Soros keeps returning to a single image when he talks about storytelling: the mirror and the window. It is a framework he uses to decide which characters belong in his books and why, and it shapes almost every creative decision he makes.
Two Purposes, One Story
“Some children need to see their own experiences reflected back to them, to know they’re not alone in what they’re feeling,” Greg Soros says of the mirror side of the equation. Other young readers, he notes, need something different entirely. They need windows into lives unlike their own, chances to build empathy for people whose circumstances look nothing like theirs.
Soros argues that the strongest children’s books manage to do both at once. A single character facing a specific struggle might let one child feel understood while showing another child an unfamiliar way of experiencing the world. Achieving that dual effect takes deliberate character selection, since a poorly chosen protagonist can accidentally serve only one function instead of both.
Representation That Goes Deeper Than Appearance
For Greg Soros, genuine representation cannot stop at surface details. “It’s not enough to simply include characters from different backgrounds,” he emphasizes. Those characters need real voices, believable challenges, and complete emotional arcs of their own rather than existing only to teach lessons to someone else.
This is where the mirror and window approach becomes demanding work rather than a simple checklist. Soros treats every character as a full person with their own internal life, regardless of how large or small their role in the plot might be. That commitment, he suggests, is what keeps a diverse cast of characters from feeling like decoration.
The result is fiction built for a wide range of young readers at once. Whether a child opens one of his books looking for familiarity or for something new to understand, Soros wants the experience to feel honest either way, not manufactured for the sake of a lesson. Refer to this article for additional information.
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