Formatting spoken logs

[J D Foster]

Hi looking for some formatting help.

I have a character who has to listen to a series of recorded audio logs from different people in the story.

She's on her own during playback and has some interaction with the recordings in the form of talking to herself.

Ideally I'd like to format the text contained in the recordings in some way to differentiate them from the rest of the narrative. Currently they are in Italics, however I feel like it is too much italic and would be hard on the eye for the reader.

How would have others gone about formatting text in these situations please?

 

[TheDustyZebra]

I would think, if it's too much text to make italics a reasonable choice, perhaps you could set off each log section with a bracket.

[Log text here, however long it may be.]

"Well, that's interesting," she said to herself.

[More log text here. And so on.]

 

[The Judge]

When I've wanted to show dialogue that's been overheard by mechanical means (eg eavesdropping on another conversation) I've used a long dash to introduce it. I've also seen that kind of thing started with a ˂ or a ˃.

If the text is long and you want something more obvious, then perhaps you could indent it all.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Courier font? (or some other different font, though some eBook readers only have a kind of courier / monospace, serif (Like Times) and sans (like this), each in any size, normal, bold, italic and bold + italic.

A larger indent works​

 

[NbDawn]

I use italics, but I like TheDustyZebra's idea of using brackets.

 

[Brian G Turner]

Currently they are in Italics, however I feel like it is too much italic and would be hard on the eye for the reader.

Could it be that your subconscious is telling you that there's too much of the audio logs? My first thought is there's a danger of your MC spending too long being passive, just listening and talking at the reader, turning it into a long infodump. Can't you just have the most important lines from the recordings come up? Simply asking.

 

[NbDawn]

Could it be that your subconscious is telling you that there's too much of the audio logs? My first thought is there's a danger of your MC spending too long being passive, just listening and talking at the reader, turning it into a long infodump.

I was thinking the same thing. It would be a boring read if the scene was just the MC listening to logs and talking to herself about them. I almost had a similar scene but ended up changing it so that someone else had already listened to the logs and only related the highlights to my MC. Doing it this way also allowed my MC to interact with another person about the findings on the log rather than simply talk to himself about it. Another possibility is to not do a scene with the MC reading the logs but put her in another scene where she can relate the highlights of her logs with another person.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Could it be that your subconscious is telling you that there's too much of the audio logs? My first thought is there's a danger of your MC spending too long being passive, just listening and talking at the reader, turning it into a long infodump.

Depends on content surely?
Some successful books were in the style of letters, almost same thing?

 

[mtzGr]

I'd increase the margin on both sides and keep it separate. Something like a block quote: http://i.stack.imgur.com/MGMFx.png

 

[J D Foster]

Wow, thanks everyone. Lots of great ideas, better ways of doing it than italics. I'm leaning towards bigger indent at the moment.

She's very much on her own, so I can't do the conversation bit. Hence she's talking to the logs as a way of easing the pain of being alone.

There is indeed an element of info dump, arguably an intrinsic moment in the plot is being communicated through one of the logs. Certainly take on board that this might be too much though. Some of the logs are conversations between other people so they play out like dialogue. Others are in the format of someone narrating their diary.

To some extent I've written myself into a corner having a MC who is alone for the vast majority of the story. It's fun, but really hard to get some parts of the plot across and also to provide enough breaks between the descriptive passages. She's doing lots of talking to herself and thinking things through in italics. Anyway, it's hard but a good challenge.

Thanks again for all the replies, massive help!