: 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

@Gloria285

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Tricks with the written words themselves

Other answers gave many useful things you can tell with books, that would be harder or impossible with other media. Internal states, not showing something, different senses, multiple points of view, passage of time, "special effects" that would be visually beyond today's technology, or even simply beautiful prose... However, you can also mess with the presentation itself in interesting ways.

You can use different typefaces, to show speech differences in subtle ways that don't really have an equivalent in non-written media. The most obvious example is A CHARACTER SPEAKING IN BOLD ALL CAPS, as used for Death with great effect in the Discworld series.

Another humorous effect in the Discworld series, there are occasionally instruments so sharp they literally cut the words in half on the page.

Much more unsettling, the book John Dies At The End does something very clever with chat logs that would be impossible to do in a non-written medium. This book is in fact a good example of many things described by other answers, and comparing it to is (otherwise well-made) film adaptation. If you are interested in weird/horror or fantastic/science-fiction in general, I highly recommend it, both as a good read and an example of what can be done with the medium.

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