Abbott’s third description of plot notes that it serves the story by highlighting or expanding upon certain events or details, thus departing from the strictly chronological order of the story.  Abbot further describes this as “the artful disclosure of story”.  Literature and film are equally engaged with this notion of plot, but in different ways, as different art forms.  Mittell points to visual and temporal aspects of this difference.  Visually, a novel can vividly describe the appearance of some part of the story world in great detail, perhaps over the course of multiple pages, while film can only present the constructed story world.  A close up of a particularly relevant item, maybe cut with important reaction shots, could highlight the element, but the camera cannot generally provide the same level of insight or emotional texture that a written paragraph may.  On the other hand, a novel could not possibly (without boring the reader to tears) describe the entirety of the story world in as much detail as a film necessarily presents, since a film production must construct a complete physical setting for the action to occupy.

          The difference in visual detail as depicted in film and television as opposed to literature relates to the differences in story-time vs. discourse-time vs. narration-time in the different forms.  Story-time is consistent across media, but film is limited in terms of its discourse-time and fixed in terms of its narration-time.  A split second event may take pages (and minutes of reading) in a novel and include different perspectives and characters’ reactions and such, but there is comparatively little a film can do other than simply show the event.  However carefully chosen the angle, focus, or scope of the shot, the duration of a physical event remains unchanged.  Editing can slow down action by inter-cutting it with other action, jump cutting, or even slowing down the film itself, but an audience can only tolerate so much of that kind of thing before losing interest if it doesn’t convey something beyond the action itself.  The idea of the camera as an ideally placed, invisible observer—consistent with the self-effacing nature of classical Hollywood style—captures these temporal restrictions, but underestimates the impact of film technique in telling the story.  Bakhtin argues that even in the most “realistic” novels, the most apparently objective, the narrator’s language interacts with the story discourse.  The same is true for film.  The telling of a movie tends to be more naturalistic, especially temporally in comparison to literature, but it is quite inaccurate to assume a neutral or objective camera.