How do you go about writing texts in a novel?

My character is texting her friends.. but I'm not sure how to go about writing the texts/conversation. Should I just have her talking on the phone instead? Thanks

Could you do it just like dialogue, just making it clear that they are texting first? If you say that the first and second people are texting, the rest should follow on, and for writing the actual texts you could use text language, as though you were merely copying and pasting the converation. I've never had to consider this before, so I'm sure this is only one way to do this.

Sometimes I write dialogue by summarizing it, in places where it makes sense to do this. Especially in what I'm writing now, where I have a first-person narrator with a somewhat sarcastic voice. Like "I told her what I was planning, and she told me I was nuts. Oh well, I said, you'll see, and she said she would, and then did that laugh of hers. I *hate* that laugh." (See how the sarcastic voice makes it easier to keep it interesting? That's the danger of this, is making it boring, so you have to kind of work on that.)

I kind of feel like having the actual "text" of a text in a novel wouldn't be good, but since they're so short, they might be easy to summarize in this same way.

The lack of spoken words makes the usual dialogue tags ("said" etc.) a little harder, but I bet you could swing it - like if Jane is texting her friends (and I'll use / / to mark italics, as those I think would look more natural for written conversation), then maybe something like this:

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Jane looked down again at the sound of the chirp. Sarah again. /So what time r u coming ovr?/

The dictionary definition of 'clingy' had Sarah Mitchell's picture underneath - she was sure of it. Jane's gaze flicked back to the tail-end of the Right Guard commercial, stalling. /Dunno yet - math hwk :( /

The next chirp was too prompt to be anything but a whole pouty string of frowny-faces, and Jane didn't hurry to tear her attention away from the opening credits of /Keeping Up with the Kardashians/. It was a toss-up between getting up to change the channel and answering Sarah - until she glanced back down and felt her heart skip a beat.

/sup/

It was HIM.

Since when did too-cool-for-school Mark text HER? Was this about yesterday after gym? Was it for real?

Jane leaned forward, half-hunching over her phone. / n/m, u? / She was careful to play it down, but she had to delete three times as her fingers kept missing their keys.

/ :( :( :( cn u do it l8r? /

A muscle in Jane's face twitched at the sight of Sarah's stupid, needy attempt at a guilt-trip, which was now DEFINITELY getting in the way of more important things. And she had the nerve to wonder why she didn't have any friends!
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...so needless to say, you can for sure find better authorities on teenage girls than me, but you get the picture. Enough little narrative hints on either side of the actual texts and there shouldn't be any confusion over who said what. Like swallowfeather said though, I wouldn't write all this out verbatim except where it's relevant or important to the story. "It took twenty minutes of juggling stupid Sarah and definitely-not-stupid Mark, but finally Jane had her weekend well in order" - would work just dandily otherwise.