Welcome back to another Open Book Blog Hop!

Today’s topic is: There don’t seem to be any universal rules for indicating texting in books and short stories. How do you handle it?

And remember to visit my fellow writers to see what they have come up with. You can find their works here!

I’ve not had much cause for thinking about this matter. In Chasing Shadows, texting isn’t a thing. Communications are pretty simplistic – wireless radio, telephones, morse code and forms of optical transmission such as semaphores. Different times. But I’ve read plenty of books that use texts and have seen them handled differently seen them used within speech or quote marks. I’m not a massive fan of this approach, it can be pretty confusing to tell it isn’t speech.

I’ve also seen texts italicised within the book. This also risks being potentially confusing. I’ve seen italics used to indicate internal thoughts, so they don’t immediately scream text messages to me. That said, this route is marginally better than the speech or quote marks method, but not by much. Some authors have used block capitals. These kind of work. Generally they’re not used in dialogue except to denote shouting and would feature within speech marks.

One thing I’ve seen, albeit pretty infrequently, is texts depicted through the book design. A graphic of sorts on the page depicting the message boxes familiar to most. The few times I’ve seen it I’ve thought it was pretty effective. It cleanly conveys the use of texts. I imagine it will slowly become more common to see in books, but right now it’s not something that will feature too much in my own work.