A lot on reading...but what about writing? I dunno.

I always tell my students that reading and writing go hand in hand, so...
thinking about the direction of my thesis project, I realized that while things have been written about reading electronic lit, little has been said about writing it. This is a problem that I want to solve, since the process of creation--as with print text--aids a reader in understanding and appreciating the complexity of the text. However, despite the predictions that (as stated below in an excerpt from Intro to E Lit) most of the 21st century cannon will be electronic, there are not (so far as I've found) any texts on the subject of authoring--only reading.

Electronic Literature’s final chapter begins with a bold, highly controversial prediction: a significant portion of the 21st-century canon will be electronic literature. Hayles’ defense of this prediction relies on the fact that almost all literature today is transferred into digital format at some point. Excluding authors like Neil Gaiman, who still creates his novels first on paper, all contemporary literature is created digitally, from start to finish. According to Hayles this has opened up space for new and innovative methods for book design, typography, and methods of marketing. Hayles emphasizes bookstores that offer print on demand, including binding, and digital downloading of texts to devices like Amazon’s Kindle. As Hayles reminds us, even if texts that are “digital born” and those that are primarily intended for print do behave differently, today they are part of a larger “complex and dynamic media ecology.” Faced with growing studies that show young people engage more with video games, YouTube, and Facebook than with print novels, it would be a copout for print authors to think of themselves as old-fashioned; rather, as print comes to integrate more and more closely with electronic forms, there are new and innovative ways it can assimilate the discoveries of electronic texts. Although Hayles states this argument in great detail, she regrettably does not offer specific examples of just what these assimilative texts might be.

This site also leads me to some more traditional sources I might view in the following passage:

Recognizing their debt to print, e-lit theorists like George Landow emphasize the form’s connections with the theories that Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes propagated about printed literature, while Scott Rettberg’s examination of the relationship between Dada and the avant garde reveals further links between bounded and unbounded literature.

Landow, for instance, understands Barthes’ and Derrida’s ideas about authorship and the multiplicity of texts in terms of e-lit. In particular, he emphasizes Barthes’ writing about the writerly text and its non-linear nature and Derrida’s about intertextuality and textual openness. Rettberg, in Dada Redux: Elements of Dadaist Practice in Contemporary Electronic Literature, connects Dada with e-lit by emphasizing the outsider aspects of both. Like Dada, e-lit has no single manifesto or headquarters, and e-lit works are created outside of standardized cultural norms. Multimedia, interdisciplinary, and audience participation are emphasized by both.

In a blog about a round table led by Jay David Bolter, the author states that part of the reason for the lack of a discussion about creation is the discomfort that "print scholars" have with media-specific analysis...and suggests turning to the art community for help.

Electronic literature has become much more interested in the mixing of modalities. This has led to the question whether electronic literature is (still) literature or whether it is or has become art. A comparison is currently made between (experimental) electronic literature and the historical avant-garde, especially there where it concerns thinking about digital forms. However, as Bolter argues, seeing electronic literature in the light of this tradition is a phase within the development of digital literature that are we are moving beyond now as well. Nowadays the study of the materiality of the digital is central to the thinking about digital literature (like it is with other media forms). Where in the print era the focus would be on media specific analysis and on the technology of inscription, nowadays the focus is on multi-modality and the mixing of forms rather than on the plurality of forms. As Bolter claims, the literary academic community will not be off much help here either. His recommendation is to turn to the art community, where they have been thinking about the condition of the medium, in a multi-medial way, for many many years and where they have developed a solid body of criticism and theory to help us.

We are required to read a digital text differently because we interact with it. Understanding the text then seems to mean, at least in part, understanding our selves. While this is true in appreciating print literature (as one considers themes and makes connections), this is required to understand digital texts, since part of their "text" is the experience the "reader" chooses.

Another essay I plan to check out about reading electronic literature is "Navigating Electronic Literature" by Jessica Pressman: http://newhorizons.eliterature.org/essay.php@id=14.html
and another about how writing will change is http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/books/digital-lit-how-new-ways-to-read-mean-new-ways-to-write/article2091205/ This talks about issues of author and reader, given the interactive nature of digital narratives. It says,

Another tricky decision is how much power to give to the reader. Since the 1990s, fiction writers have experimented with hypertext, letting the reader follow secondary or subsequent passages out of the main text (perhaps never to return). Seminal works – such as These Waves of Girls, a hypertext short story about a car accident, created in 1987; or Shelly Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, a feminist retelling of the Frankenstein story, published in 1995 – established the new field of electronic fiction, and the issue of authorial control has been hotly debated ever since.

“You get these interactive projects – it’s such a novelty, the first 20 minutes the person is just learning the interface,” says Alex Jansen, the owner of Pop Sandbox, a small digital publisher that produced The Next Day and will turn to fiction with a forthcoming photo novella based on a short story by Toronto writer and Globe and Mail columnist Russell Smith. “By the time they are done clicking, they have taken the narrative into the middle of nowhere. You do still need a storyteller.”

The Next Day team discussed how much interactivity they should really include in the online version of the project, which will be hosted by the National Film Board’s and TV Ontario’s websites, and finally decided to limit it. You can chart your own path through these four stories of attempted suicides and their emotional aftermath, but the site is programmed so that you can’t limit yourself to a single story but will hear at least part of all four.

In addition, it discusses the fact that "serious writers" aren't experimenting with digital text.

Prof. Fisher agrees that the issue is how to draw the reader through the text. “It’s interesting to say maybe people would navigate your novel like a game environment,” she says. “People find a game environment compelling. [But] does it always have to be a puzzle or maze? Could great writing draw you through it? … We don’t have serious writers experimenting with it.”

Fisher also notes how seductive video is, hoping books will not simply be replaced by some version of interactive film or augmented reality. “We have this push that all literature can become movies. Everyone can cheaply make and edit moving pictures. It is pushing out interesting experiments in writing.”