forum how to format text messages in writing

Started April 07, 2019 by @Lupout

tune

So does anyone have advice of how to format texts between two characters in a novel? It seems like there's no perfectly grammatically correct way to do it (at least none I can think of) and I've been writing it like this,

I opened my phone to a slew of unread text messages. Katie had sent about half of them. the first one said:

Are you okay?!

and after that:

Hello?

dude srsly answer me I'm getting worried

Asher

!!

anyway the slanted writing is supposed to be the texts and each new line is supposed to be a new bubble, but I don't like how it looks, and I don't know if the colon thing is correct, and I don't know if my intentions for what is text and what isn't makes sense to the average reader when I format it like this.

Anyway, if anyone has ideas let me know.

Hmm. There's an author Maggie Stiefvater who has texts in her series The Raven Cycle and it would look something like this

I opened my phone to a slew of unread text messages. Katie had sent about half of them.

/Are you okay?!/
/Hello?/
/dude srsly answer me I'm getting worried/
/Asher/
/!!/

So, that would all be in italics, but I don't think you would need to mention the order of the texts or use the colons since the texts are already in order. If you still want to break them up for pacing reasons, you could say something about the timestamps between the texts. Still mention who's speaking/texting though. You know, for example…

I texted back.

/Yeah I'm here/

That's my best guess. Hope this helps :)