There was something vaguely familiar about a story I read the other day.

And I’ve been noticing it more often.

I’ll read something—sometimes just a paragraph—and it’s technically good. Clean. Clear. Easy to follow. And yet … it feels familiar. Not in a bad way. Not wrong. Just … similar to something I’ve read before.

For a second, I caught myself wondering if it was AI. That felt like the obvious answer. But the more I paid attention, the less that explanation held up. Because I’ve seen it in fiction writing that I know wasn’t generated. Writing that’s been revised, edited, polished—sometimes very well.

So if you’re pointing and waving—“It’s AI, it’s AI!”—I’m not so sure.

What if it’s how we learned to write?

We read what worked, we absorbed it, we tried it ourselves. That’s always been part of it. But I also wonder how much of it comes from the way writing gets shaped over time—by editors, by publishers.

Make that sentence clear.
Make the story flow.
Don’t make a reader pause too long or work too hard.
(Okay, slightly dramatic. But all good things.)

So when everything moves in that same direction—cleaner, tighter, more polished—it starts to land in a similar place. And at some point, I couldn’t help but wonder—are we all being shaped by the same idea of what “good writing” is supposed to sound like?

Because editing does that too. Not in a heavy-handed way. Not intentionally. But line by line, decision by decision, we nudge writing toward what reads easily. What flows. What feels right.

And over time, that “feels right” starts to sound, well … familiar. Even when the story itself is completely different. Even when the writer is.

I’m not saying this is a problem.

But I do think it’s something worth noticing. (‘Just saying,’ as I repeat the fallback phrase my son would use to stubbornly argue his case.)

Because there’s a difference between writing that reads well … and writing that feels like someone sat down and wrote it. And lately, I’ve been paying more attention to that.