At one time novels were the foremost way to tell complex stories of all types. All the genres that now span all types of media were put into books at one time or another. Even serial stories, which might have been first published in newspapers, would later be compiled into books.

Since the dawn of cinema the strength of novels to portray certain types of stories has been called into question. Just like photography changed painting, movies have changed novels. Not a matter of better or worse but rather elegance and efficiency, each medium has proven to have characteristics that better suit the telling of certain tales.

Literal In Movies More Precise

Movies, like photography, can more accurately convey details of physical objects. Where a novel may take pages to describe a busy street scene, a movie can do so in a few seconds with images. Even with sounds, movies can be more accurate and faster. It may take a paragraph to get the essence of a blood-curdling scream where a second of audio gets the point across much quicker.

Figurative More Elegant In Novels

True to life description of people, places and things only conveys part of the whole. There are lots of subjective aspects that can get lost in the mix if you only offer a literal description. There are lots of ways to communicate what something is and many of them movies don't do as well as prose. Metaphors and similes that offer an impressionistic portrait of something aren't suited for movies where they would have to be told in voice over, dialogue, or on-screen titles. This also requires a mindset change, the images will be created in the mind and not seen on screen. Novels are a more active experience, movies are a passive one. Thus the cooperation of a reader is easier to conjure in novels.

Novels Account Internal Struggles Better

As much as we'd like to believe we know what's doing through a character's head in a movie at any one time, we don't. We can try to elicit what they are thinking based on facial expression or body posture, but really these are just guesses. We can prognosticate about what internal conflicts they are wrestling with but they will more likely be a projection from our own lives. The novel with its breadth and length doesn't have the near 2-hour time limit a movie has and can go into these sorts of things in depth. A novel can stop action for pages and elucidate the mental block a character is having that keeps him or her from taking the action they know they should. A novel can insert paragraphs with precise descriptions of what they are thinking and what they are feeling. Novels can be more accurate with internal matters whereas a movie gives the audience the opportunity to fill in those gaps on their own.

Novels Are A Way To Make Impossible Movies

It's easy to dismiss a novel as a way to deliver a story if it can be made as a film. Why waste the space describing things that can more quickly and easily be shown in pictures. Making films is not as straight-forward a process as putting words on paper and certain things that might make a good film will be impossible to bring to the screen. If the story is prohibitively expensive to produce, maybe requiring a cast of thousands with period costumes and enormous sets, then it's better to make it a novel rather than not at all. There are also certain quirky stories that can't easily be done in film that can be done in novels. In prose you can have a dead movie star as your protagonist where this could only be done as a cartoon in a movie.

Movies haven't made novels irrelevant, but they have made clear what they are good at and not good at. Instead of railing against these facts, use it to your advantage. Write novels from material that is not suited to a screen presentation. Instead of trying to compete with what the movies can already do in a superior fashion do what it could never do.