John Fowles on the strengths of the novel vs. the screenplay:
Why have I got it in for the novel? […] All the purely visual and aural sequences in the modern novel are a bore, both to read and to write. People’s physical appearance, their movements, their sounds, places, moods of places – the camera and the microphone enrigister these twenty times better than the typewriter. If the novel is to survive it must narrow its field to what other systems of recording can’t record. I say ‘one day’ because the reading public still isn’t very aware of what I call mischannelling – that is, using the wrong art form to express or convey what you mean.
In other words, to write a novel in 1964 is to be neurotically aware of trespassing, especially on the domain of the cinema. […] All of us […] write cinematically; our imaginations, constantly fed on films, ‘shoot; scenes, and we write descriptions of what has been shot. So for us a lot of novel writing is, or seems like, the tedious translating of an unmade and never-to-be-made film into words.
- John Fowles, I Write Therefore I Am (1964) in Wormholes (London: Random House, 1998) p. 7.