This artefact is a study of the processes which affect the composition of a novel, both before its conscious inception and after, and an active, interrelated and intertextual examination of the role of the reader within the writer. It relates reader theory and Bakhtinian dialogics to the inscription and reception of a text by considering the reception given by its first reader, the author, during the action of its composition. Following Bakhtin's assertion that human discourse "always wants to be heard ... always is in search of responsive understanding ... For discourse (and, therefore for man) nothing is more frightening than the absence of answer", this thesis examines the ways that reader theory and Bakhtin' s heteroglossial dialogism affect the production of a creative artefact, during and within the process of its creation. The traditional reader theory of Jauss, Iser, Fish et al restricts the actions of reading to those who receive the text, after its dissemination, and refuses to acknowledge the presence of the author during such readings. Yet during a text's creation the author 'reads' it many times, including those mental readings given to each sentence before it takes physical form on the page. When the multitude of voices inherent in Bakhtinian dialogism are added to this compositional process, the readings, reconsiderations and re-appropriations of each individual construction of language create a fluid, mutative compositional act, whereby the reading of a text, in the act of its creation, leads to change. Both creatively and critically, Past Imperfect examines how these creative choices are made, and why. It analyses the ways in which authors manipulate language to create meaning, and the ways that the process of this manipulation itself manipulates the author.