: Re: What can a novel do that film and TV cannot? I have enjoyed writing prose for years and have a few short stories penned. I would like to build up to a novel but believe I have identified

@Goswami879

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You've already gotten quite a few good answers, but there's one important point that I didn't see in any of them:

You can omit visual and aural details.

If you don't want to tell the age of the protagonist, or the hair colour, or the type of clothes, or if you don't want to tell it yet, then you can. In film and TV that's not possible; the protagonist is right in front of your eyes, complete with apparent age, hair colour, clothing, everything.

Another example: In Orwell's 1984, Winston Smith is tortured with a machine that is described by the torturer as machine that can apply a defined quantity of hurt (I don't remember the exact wording, and I read it in German translation anyway, but that's roughly what was said). There's IIRC no further description of that machine, and that's a good thing. In the movie, they didn't have the luxury of not showing the machine, and that mysterious machine turned into a rather mundane torture instrument.

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