Time & Perspective Quote by John Sladek

Novel-writing isn’t just labor; it’s a state of porousness. Sladek’s line is a small, practical warning that quietly admits how unprotected the writer’s mind becomes mid-book. While drafting a novel, you’re building a private weather system: a voice, a rhythm, a moral temperature. Reading widely is usually a virtue, but Sladek points to the hazard of cross-contamination. Another author’s cadences can slip into your sentences like an uninvited melody you can’t stop humming. Plots don’t get stolen so much as they get nudged, and the writer often can’t tell where the nudge came from until it’s too late.

The phrasing is tellingly modest: “some time ago” and “be careful” make it sound like a lesson learned the hard way, not a grand theory. That restraint is the subtext. He’s not denouncing reading; he’s confessing vulnerability. The line also hints at a more anxious, very modern pressure: the fear of being derivative, of sounding like your influences instead of sounding like yourself. “While working on a novel” narrows the warning to the period when your own style is still wet cement.

Coming from Sladek, a writer associated with sharp-edged, idea-driven science fiction and satire, the caution lands with extra bite. His work thrives on control: precision, pacing, the calibrated reveal. Protecting your inputs becomes a way of protecting your instrument. It’s less about purity than about maintaining a signal strong enough to survive the noise.