Writing out chat logs between characters

[LiterallyLiterate]

Just a quick question, really:
I’m working on a story/stories now where my characters from time to time text each other.
Will it be obvious to the readers if I use the alignment function to put MC’s texts on the right and whoever he/she is texting with on the left?
Like:

Hi! Wyd?

Just chillin’
Why?​

I’m bored, wanna hang?

 

[Voyeurkenneth]

I don't think I've seen that alignment formatting carried over to a story.

Are you tagging it a certain way with html?

 

[LiterallyLiterate]

I seem to remember seeing that as an option somewhere, though html formatting won’t work, I think. I douldn’t find it right now, but there was an article about formatting where I found the <em> tag to prompt italic font and stuff, pretty sure I saw something about alignment there as well.

 

[Rustyoznail]

I think it works on a computer, but I don't think it works on the mobile app.

 

[M_K_Babalon]

I just make it regular conversation,f course... I have no interest in doing anymore formatting, than neccessary.

 

[PennyThompson]

Yes you can absolutely do this! It just takes a bit of HTML. I did it in my story Life Drawing for Developing Artists.

I'm not at my computer, but tomorrow I can share the needed code to make it work properly

 

[ElectricBlue]

Just a quick question, really:
I’m working on a story/stories now where my characters from time to time text each other.
Will it be obvious to the readers if I use the alignment function to put MC’s texts on the right and whoever he/she is texting with on the left?
Like:

Hi! Wyd?

Just chillin’
Why?​

I’m bored, wanna hang?

Best not do that. You can't predict how different device screens will present that.

- do this EB suggested -

- yeah that will work -

Treat it like dialogue, just designate it differently.

 

[mildlyaroused]

You may find this thread useful. It has lots of replies.
https://forum.literotica.com/threads/how-to-portray-a-text-message-conversation.1623512/

I'd add that, while messages/texts can be a great way to show personality, you can definitely overdo things with the slang or texting conventions. It's like accents: if things stray too far from widely-understood standard English, it mightn't read to others as smoothly as it reads to you. Lengthy conversations can become tiresome when depicted as texts. But feel free to ignore me - you didn't ask, and your example looks fine to me.

 

[LiterallyLiterate]

You may find this thread useful. It has lots of replies.
https://forum.literotica.com/threads/how-to-portray-a-text-message-conversation.1623512/

I'd add that, while messages/texts can be a great way to show personality, you can definitely overdo things with the slang or texting conventions. It's like accents: if things stray too far from widely-understood standard English, it mightn't read to others as smoothly as it reads to you. Lengthy conversations can become tiresome when depicted as texts. But feel free to ignore me - you didn't ask, and your example looks fine to me.

Thanks, I’ll have a look at that thread.

As for language, I’m not very fond of using slang anyway, so I’ll likely limit myself to the usual abbreviations. In any event, I’m only planning on using it for short messages between the characters, not whole conversations.
They’re usually together in my stories anyway, so no need to use texting much, but she wants to send a selfie as she’s riding him to the girl she’s convincing him to do a threesome with.

 

[StillStunned]

I have a WIP about an older man and a young woman. Several of the scene shifts start with an exchange of texts, which I've formatted in italics and with the POV character's text aligned right (using <p align= “right”>....</p>).

The older man writes full sentences and signs off with his name. The young woman doesn't use apostrophes in contractions or add a full stop at the end of her texts. This is particularly noticeable (to me at least) because she's training to be a proofreader/editor.

 

[PennyThompson]

Okay so for the text message formatting, you have to do some slightly annoying and fiddly HTML. I know a little bit of web design from my outside life, which helps, but you don't need to know much to make it work.

I think you probably need to submit your story as Story Text and not as a file. I'm not positive, maybe you can accomplish this with a .doc or .txt file, but given how long it takes to edit a mistake, I haven't risked it.

Although none of the Lit formatting guides I've found mentions this, you can use

</br>

tags to force line breaks without creating new paragraphs. Combine that with

<u>

and

<div align="right">

and you can do a reasonably good text message conversation!

So this is what the code looks like:

<u>Sent at 9:20am</u></br>Hi Marci, you wanted</br>me to message you??</br>

<div align="right"><u>Sent at 9:24am</u></br>Penny hiii :D</br>How are you doing?</br>I wanted to check on</br>you after last night.</br>How are you doing?</br></div>

Notice that I don't put any natural line breaks between texting lines, I only use the line break tag. If you don't do that, you'll end up with big paragraph gaps between each line. This is how it renders as a Lit story:



I'm also thinking about how different people text, depending on their personality and age. Penny is a Gen Z good girl, so she tries to type correctly and doesn't use too many emojis, but avoids periods and ellipses because they're too aggressive. Marci is a Gen X mommy, so she still uses old style emojis, and lots of periods.

 

[LiterallyLiterate]

I had the impression Lit didn’t work too well with html tags in the text. But I’ll see if I want to try it when it’s time to think about publishing, this particular story I’m writing is some six or seven stories down the line in my schedule.

Anyways, I appreciate the feedback from everyone. Ideally we could make something similar to a screenshot of an actual conversation and add, but that is a hope for the future.

I think I might just stay with something simpler, like outlining the messages with bold or italic, and set it up more like a normal dialogue, but we’ll see.

 

[PennyThompson]

I had the impression Lit didn’t work too well with html tags in the text. But I’ll see if I want to try it when it’s time to think about publishing, this particular story I’m writing is some six or seven stories down the line in my schedule.

There's a limited subset of HTML tags that Lit will accept and render correctly. There's no official list of what tags will work, as far as I know. And also some of them will render correctly in the preview panel, and some that won't

 

[ElectricBlue]

I had the impression Lit didn’t work too well with html tags in the text. But I’ll see if I want to try it when it’s time to think about publishing, this particular story I’m writing is some six or seven stories down the line in my schedule.

Lit does accept some html, but be aware it can go spectacularly wrong - if the user takes their eye off the ball. I had an entire second page of a story switch to italics, because the page break happened at the same time I had a phrase in italics. Problem was, the italics weren't switched off correctly (my fault), so the whole next page...

 

[LiterallyLiterate]

There's a limited subset of HTML tags that Lit will accept and render correctly. There's no official list of what tags will work, as far as I know. And also some of them will render correctly in the preview panel, and some that won't

Lit does accept some html, but be aware it can go spectacularly wrong - if the user takes their eye off the ball. I had an entire second page of a story switch to italics, because the page break happened at the same time I had a phrase in italics. Problem was, the italics weren't switched off correctly (my fault), so the whole next page...

All the more reason to not try something fancy, I think.