How to write whatsapp conversation in a story?

[sweetdreamssss]

In my story there is a small whatsapp conversation between the main characters.Its very important to this story. How can I incorporate them in the story iin a correct manner.
Here K and M are the main characters and they are chatting over whatsapp

K : Hey look, whatever that happened was a mistake

M : A very beautiful mistake

K : Ummmmm we shouldnt have done this and I am sorry

M : yes we shouldnt have done this but I'm not sorry

K : Please dont say this again

M : Well how can i come over seeing that exquisite in my life. Your body was heavenly and it would have been rude to keep my hands off you

K : Oh God!! please dont talk like that

 

[SchnellFick]

"God, what have I done," K thought and cupped his face in his hands. He started to remember the day before, her soft breasts, and the feeling of her hard nipples between his kneading fingers. He leaned back. "That was so wrong. I've to tell M... no! I can't look into M's eyes now."
His guilt-ridden thoughts were interrupted by the ping of a new Whatapp message. "That's it, I text M!" he murmured to himself and reached for his phone.
"Hey look, whatever that happened was a mistake" he wrote and put his phone back on the table, waiting anxiously for the reply.

The response came in and he didn't believe his eyes. "A very beautiful mistake" M had written. No, no no! " he thought and replied , "Ummmmm we shouldnt have done this and I am sorry"


--------------------
And then you just continue like this. It is a dialogue after all.

 

[nice90sguy]

Please look at page 2 of my story Findom Challenge Ch. 01 (latest story in my sig), where I do a pretty good job of it, if I say so myself. The story has a very high rating, which I think is partly down to the formatting of the chats.

 

[TheLobster]

I second the advice that you shouldn't just dump the entire transcript verbatim. What happens between messages is similar to characters' thoughts and action between bits of dialogue, except even more prominent because of the inherent delay of typing.

This saying, it is not spoken dialogue, so it shouldn't be formatted as such. You can get creative there since AFAIK there are no set standards. In one of my stories (on the first page) I used <kbd></kbd> for styling the text so it comes out monospaced, and <p align="right"></p> to align the MCs chats to the right, imitating how it would look on his screen in one particular (albeit unnamed) messaging app.

 

[nice90sguy]

WhatsApp isnt monospaced - I tried that and I thought it looked really bad my story.

The right/left align thing is important though.

And I advise the opposite -- as long as your writing style is clear, then it provides a lot more verisimilutde to actually reproduce chats "verbatim", abbreviations, emojis and spelling mistakes included.

 

[TheLobster]

Oh, I do include emoji and typos. In fact, I’d give different characters different spelling “styles,” where some would include apostrophes in contractions and some wouldn’t, etc.

There are also obvious differences between devices being used. If someone types on a phone, sentences will always start capitalized; not so on a computer. Some apps include indicators when the other person is typing, so you can mention that for added tension.

All in all, messaging apps are pretty great. This site is still overrun by boomers so stories tend to implicitly assume the most advanced form of remote communication is a rotary phone but I’m glad it seems to be slowly changing.

 

[nice90sguy]

the most advanced form of remote communication is a rotary phone

Great scene in the Kevin Kline movie (1990's) "In and Out" where the young supermodel stares at a rotary phone, and taps at it with her fingers, and gives up with frustration

 

[mildlyaroused]

Others can tell you how to format fancily. I'd have no idea.

But more generally, treat texts no differently to dialogue. That is, you can inject subtext and flavour into the texts by adding actions and thoughts around them. How does M react to hearing that K regrets what happened? Or conversely, how does K feel when they have to tell M that it was a mistake? Where are they? Ground us in the narrative!

I don't include texts often in my stories, but one way to make them more interesting is to have characters sometimes send more than one in a row. This way, you can add subtext to the virtual conversation without outright saying it in monologue or action.

For instance:

K : Hey look, whatever that happened was a mistake

M : A very beautiful mistake.

M: Don't you think?

K : Ummmmm we shouldnt have done this and I am sorry

Here, M sends two texts in a row. Doing this sort of thing could imply that M is feeling insecure, or keen for K to agree. It adds a subtle touch of characterisation.

 

[oneagainst]

As above... M: on one line, K: on the other - like it's a conversation, where each person's speech is a new para. Then you can still drop a para of thinking or doing the shopping or whatever, and cut back to the M: and K: lines, simulating the passing of time since there's more of that than a verbal conversation.

Though @nice90sguy 's rendering in that Findom story is a thing of true beauty, down to the lipstick kisses.

 

[nice90sguy]

Though @nice90sguy 's rendering in that Findom story is a thing of true beauty, down to the lipstick kisses.

 

[TheLobster]

Though @nice90sguy 's rendering in that Findom story is a thing of true beauty, down to the lipstick kisses.

I find those horizontal lines very distracting, but I definitely like the use of Unicode symbols to indicate who's talking. Many apps draw speech bubbles; I need to figure out which Unicode symbols can be used to simulate that. (I tried with <[ text like this ] and [ text like that ]> but it doesn't look super great).

 

[Inkent]

I tend to just use single quotation marks wrapping italic text, hopefully the readers can follow the conversation. As it happens, just had a story published today with a Whatapp conversation as part of the narrative as shown by the quick snippet below:

--------------------

She picked her phone up and crept into the bathroom to use the toilet. She looked at her phone, expecting to see one or more messages but, was surprised to see that there was one from Monica. She responded, and then the messages flowed back and forth quickly.

'Is he all man? I bet he was an animal and you can barely walk this morning '

Faith wondered how she knew she was going to sleep with Toby.

'He was everything and more, I made the right choice!'

'Now it's happened, you won't believe how he's waited and engineered things to get to fuck you. He told me about the Olympics, he told me how you are the one that got away."

--------------------

I don't believe there is any right or wrong way to represent indirect conversations such as phone conversations, text messages, etc, as long as it's clear for the reader?

 

[nice90sguy]

I find those horizontal lines very distracting, but I definitely like the use of Unicode symbols to indicate who's talking. Many apps draw speech bubbles; I need to figure out which Unicode symbols can be used to simulate that. (I tried with <[ text like this ] and [ text like that ]> but it doesn't look super great).

I spent more time trying to do whatsapp speech bubbles than writing the story. If you figure it out, I'd love to know!

 

[ElectricBlue]

This saying, it is not spoken dialogue, so it shouldn't be formatted as such. You can get creative there since AFAIK there are no set standards. In one of my stories (on the first page) I used <kbd></kbd> for styling the text so it comes out monospaced, and <p align="right"></p> to align the MCs chats to the right, imitating how it would look on his screen in one particular (albeit unnamed) messaging app.

It's a form of dialogue though, an exchange between two characters.

- my recommendation is to always keep it simple

- like this?

- yes like that. it's obvious it's a text or an email, or whatsapp, whatever, just from the formatting

Keep it consistent and simple. Readers are clever, they'll figure it out.

 

[SimonDoom]

I think the OP's proposed format looks fine. I follow three principles when it comes to things like text or similar conversations:

Number 1, make it simple and clear. It should always be clear who is communicating.

Number 2, be consistent. Your readers will accept almost any format you choose as long as it's simple enough to follow and you stick with it. Readers get used to formatting methods very quickly, so as long as it's simple and consistent you don't have to worry about it being perfect.

Number 3, don't do too much of it. A long, unbroken exchange in this format could get tedious quickly. Do it in snippets, interspersed with other formats that show what the characters are doing and thinking as they text/chat/whatever.

 

[Mogrem]

Off-topic:

Findom

I've never heard of 'findom' before. I started sketching out a 'Mika Häkkinen taking control of a naughty race engineer in the paddock at Silverstone' story. It was all going to be told through excitable narration by Murray Walker. So I was disappointed to discover that findom doesn't mean 'being dominated by a Fin'. Guess I'll have to can that masterpiece.

 

[nice90sguy]

"and he's skidded off the road!!!! I hope they're not hgoing to stop the race"

 

[Boobytrap73]

The goal is that it's understandable to the reader. You want to 1) show it as a dialog between the characters and 2) indicated that it's not a face-to-face, verbal conversation. I think the way you've shown it meets those criteria. You'll just need to include a transitional line to indicate that it's on an app ("I opened WhatsApp on my phone and told her what I had been thinking.")

In a couple of stories, I've had the characters talk (and more) over a made up app I called "RocketTalk" which could be Zoom or FaceTime but avoided using the brand names. Once I set it up that they're online, I just did normal dialog.

~BT73

 

[Mogrem]

"and he's skidded off the road!!!! I hope they're not hgoing to stop the race"

There's a whole series in that: sports erotica conveyed though the medium of famous commentators.

Boxdom, with Howard Costello: "Frazier's [gone] down! Frazier's [gone] down!"

 

[nice90sguy]

There was alsoh Howard Cosell narrating a sex scene in Woody Allen's Annie Hall - or another of his early movies, before he got all serious and intellectual.

 

[TheLobster]

In a couple of stories, I've had the characters talk (and more) over a made up app I called "RocketTalk" which could be Zoom or FaceTime but avoided using the brand names. Once I set it up that they're online, I just did normal dialog.

I do it for video chat, too, i.e. just a normal dialogue. The small foibles that this medium of communication has over a normal face-to-face dialog aren't really notable enough to warrant special treatment in a story. It's just regular dialog, although of course you'd make it clear it happens over a camera + microphone + a computer.

But this thread is specifically about synchronous text communication, which is an entirely different medium.

 

[mrs_mackenzie]

I have included WhatsApp chats in several of my stories. I just call it 'texting' (to avoid needing to use a brand name) since it's functionally the same thing.

I don't use any special formatting (although I do like the aligne right idea), I just lay it out like this:

Caroline: Are you there, Danny?

Danny: What's up? x

Caroline: Could you nip over and water the orchid? x

Danny: I'll be round as soon as work's over xx

And so on. I've never had a reader complain about it being difficult to interpret or read. I often interrupt the flow with character's thoughts or reactions, but not always, especially as these days people really do just text back and forth with almost no delay.

Trying to sustain a long text chain as dialogue in the traditional manner is really very difficult and, ultimately, I'm writing amateur erotica, not a masterpiece. If it's clear enough to the reader, that works for me. Especially when the texts are intended to be erotic themselves, I want the reader to be presented with the sexy words on the screen, rather than awkward paraphrasing. And phone sex/sexting is such a huge part of people's sex lives in the modern world, I find.

Hope this helps a bit.

 

[Boobytrap73]

But this thread is specifically about synchronous text communication, which is an entirely different medium.

True but I wonder if that matters to the reader in terms of understanding the content of the dialog. If there is break in time between one text and the next one, and it's significant to the story than it would have to be shown differently than plain dialog.

I guess my bottom line (if I was writing OP's story) would be to let the dialog instead of the medium drive the story.

~BT73

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

In my story there is a small whatsapp conversation between the main characters.Its very important to this story. How can I incorporate them in the story iin a correct manner.
Here K and M are the main characters and they are chatting over whatsapp

I've done this in a few stories and what you're doing is fine. I'd recommend bolding the text to distinguish a little further from the rest of the story.