A story is an erasure?

A fellow writer and Facebook friend recently quoted this line, in fact, he was quoting his own character, which is lovely:

“People think a story preserves, that it saves someone from oblivion. They do not know that, in the deepest sense, a story is an erasure. Every sentence rewrites a person into words, an irreversible loss.”

A beautiful thought. And when we write about a real person, I think it is true. Every sentence chooses. Every sentence simplifies. A life is always larger than the version we manage to put on the page.

But with a fictional character, the matter is different.

Some of my characters do rebel. They seem to want to live outside the narration, differently from how I first imagined them. They certainly live in my head, and that is fascinating. Sometimes it is also annoying. One of my unruly protagonists became so intrusive that I had to shift the narration into the third person just to gain some distance from him; he was beginning to take over my voice, and not always for the better.

Still, a fictional character does not exist anywhere outside the writing in a fuller form. Even if we think of drafts, outlines, or alternative versions, we are not altering some prior, independent being. We are selecting, shaping, and revising possibilities.

The sentences do not erase the character. They create him.

What remains unchosen is not a lost life, but a trace of the writing process.

That, I think, is the difference. A story about a real person may distort, reduce, or betray a life that already existed. But a fictional character cannot be shortened by the story, because the story is the only place where that character begins to live.