: 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

@Sent2472441

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There are already a lot of good answers here and my answer will overlap some of them, but I think it's an interesting question so I want to answer anyway. :-)

One: Time. I'm not sure how long it takes to read a typical novel, but I now I've spent entire days reading some books. A movie has to fit into one modest length. 2 hours is a long movie. So a novel can take the time to go into depth that a movie just can't.

Indeed, often when I see a movie, I can tell that it was based on a book even if I didn't know that up front. You can see that they had to cram things in. I recall one movie I saw where the heros are captured by the villains and thrown into a dungeon. Then suddenly there's another prisoner with them with no explanation of who she is or where she came from. A little later the characters escape and she is killed during the escape. She served no useful purpose to the story. And I thought to myself, I bet this story was based on a book, in which this character had some important role, and they had to drop that all out for the movie and ended up with her simply appearing and disappearing for no apparent reason. (I checked and found the movie was indeed based on a book, though I never read it to check on the details.)

Or to take an example where the movie-makers had fun with it, there was a kids' movie I saw with my daughter about a girl rock band that had a scene where a character shows up for no apparent reason. Someone asks her, "What are you doing here?", and she replies, "I had to be here. I was in the comic book." Then you never see her again.

Two: Philosophizing. In a novel, a character or the narrator can go into a discussion about his views on life, the universe, and everything. If, say, the hero's wife dies, the book can discuss his sorrow, how much he misses her, his quandary over what he will do with his life now, etc. That's very tough in a movie. You could have the hero give a speech, but sometimes these thoughts aren't the sort of thing you'd say to others. You could have him talk to himself, but that can make him look crazy. You can have him sit in a room staring at a wall with a voice-over, but that quickly gets tedious in a movie.

Three: Background exposition. If there's background information you need to give, in a novel you can just give it with narration. In a movie, somebody has to say it. This often results in implausible "as you know" dialog where characters tell each other things that the characters obviously know, and the only reason for them to say it is to inform the audience. Like in an historical novel, you could easily include a few sentences of narration saying something like, "In 1810, Britain and France were at war. Britain had the more powerful navy, but France had the greater strength on land. Britain relied on allies to supply most of the ground troops ..." etc. In a movie, sure, you could have one character turn to another and say, "The year is now 1810, and Britain and France are at war. Britain has the more powerful navy ..." etc. But who would really say that? Screenwriters often try to come up with some pretext for characters to explain this sort of background to each other. Like the hero will show up in a classroom teaching current events to a group of children. Why the hero quit his job as an international spy to become a school teacher, and then apparently a day or two later went back to being a spy, is left completely unexplained. Or a character will be introduced who is completely ignorant of everything going on so that everyone has to explain everything to him. Sometimes good writers manage to make these explanations plausible, but often not.

Four: You can reveal what you want to reveal and hide what you want to hide. For example, in the novel "Second Foundation", at the end we learn that two characters that the reader had assumed were different people all along were really the same person. (To avoid spoilers, I won't say who.) That's easy to do in a novel: Just never give descriptions of them that are detailed enough that a reader would realize they are the same person. That's tough to do in a movie. You could have one of them always wearing a mask or something, but unless there's some very good pretext for it, the viewer is going to wonder why we never see this guy's face. He's obviously trying to hide his identify, so who is he really?

There was a Twilight Zone episode -- sorry, I forget the title -- where the premise was that in this future society, the people were all what we would call hideously deformed, and what we call beauty they considered ugly. The story was about a beautiful woman that they were trying to operate on to make her ugly like the rest of them. But to make the story work, the viewer had to not know that she was really the beautiful one and everyone else the ugly ones until the end of the story. So through the whole story we never see anyone's face. Okay, not a problem when the doctors are operating on her -- they're wearing surgical masks. But everywhere else, everyone's face was always in shadow, or they were standing behind something, etc. As a viewer I thought it was very obvious that they were hiding everyone's faces, and so it wasn't hard to guess the "surprise" ending. But in a written story that would have been easy.

Five: Imagination. In a novel, you can easily write that the starship looked like thus-and-so, or that the building was 10,000 feet tall, or that the heros were being attacked by an army of elves. The reader can then picture this in his mind. In a movie, you have to actually show it. As the technology of special effects are improving, this is becoming less of an issue. I'm sure we've all seen older movies where the special effects were lame.

But even with high tech special effects, sometimes the reader's imagination is better than special effects because the reader can picture something that "fits the bill" for him. Like in a book you can say, "Sally was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen", and the reader will picture his ideal of a beautiful woman. In a movie, you have to show an actual woman, and different viewers will have different tastes and so any given woman is unlikely to be EVERY man's ideal.

Or in a novel, you can say, "He replied with a torrent of profanity." In a movie we have to hear the actual words. But different readers/viewers have different tolerances for profanity. To one person, "gosh darn it!" is beyond the limits of acceptable public speech. To another person it is laughing mild. At the other extreme, language that would lean one person to say, "yup, that's the sort of thing I'd say in that situation", might cause another to leave the theater in disgust. But in a novel you can be vague and let the reader fill in what he thinks is appropriate in his own mind.

Of course movies have advantages over novels, too. But that's another subject.

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