There is a belief about being creative that treats imitation as some sort of failure of originality. Both by ourselves and by those “outside” watching. Copying is something to be embarrassed about. A phase to rush through and never mention.

I want to make the case that this is completely backwards. Not just as encouragement, but as a description of how creative development actually works. Copying isn’t the shameful opposite of real creative work. It’s the foundation it’s built on.

Everyone You Admire Started This Way

Hunter S. Thompson, one of the most distinctive voices in American journalism, spent years typing out other writers’ novels word for word. Not paraphrasing. Typing. He copied F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in full. He copied Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. He later explained: “If you type out somebody’s work, you learn a lot about it. Amazingly it’s like music… I wanted to learn from the best.”

The Beatles spent years covering Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and every American rock and roll record they could find. At least fifteen Chuck Berry songs were in their set at various points. Paul McCartney learned his vocal style directly from Little Richard, who actually taught him the technique in person. They weren’t hiding the influence: they were studying it so thoroughly it became part of them.

In visual art, copying the masters is still a formal part of training. Students in art schools spend hours in galleries reproducing works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Velázquez: not to produce replicas, but to understand the choices behind them. The brushstroke, the composition, the light. You can’t learn that from observation alone.

T.S. Eliot put it plainly, in a line that’s been repeated enough times to feel like a cliché but remains true: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” He meant that the deeper engagement, the one that actually moves your own work forward, is when you take something from another creative and make it genuinely yours. Not just a copy. A theft.

Why It Works

Copying forces you to understand the decisions, not just the results.

When you listen to a song you love, or read a paragraph that works perfectly, or look at a photograph that lands exactly right, you’re experiencing the end product. The choices that created it are invisible. You feel the effect, but you don’t necessarily see the mechanism.

When you copy, the mechanism becomes visible. You discover that the sentence works because of a specific rhythm, not just the words. The musical phrase works because of the note in the bass, not just the melody. The image works because of what’s out of frame, not just what’s in it.

That discovery is the education. And it’s one you can only get by doing it, not by analysing from the outside.

Bonus thought: copying with your hands is different from copying with your eyes. You learn different things depending on how you engage with the work.

How You Stop Copying (And Why You Can’t Force It)

So when do you stop imitating? When does the imitation phase end? Well, it’s not an exact science. You don’t decide when it ends. It ends when your influences have been so thoroughly absorbed that they stop showing up in your work as recognisable sources and start showing up as something else.

Bob Dylan arrived in New York in 1961 sounding almost entirely like Woody Guthrie: same vocal style, same guitar approach, the same folk repertoire. He even visited Guthrie in hospital, learning directly from the source. The imitation wasn’t hidden or apologised for. It was thorough.

Within a few years, Dylan had transformed that absorbed tradition into something that had never existed before: literary, surreal, electric, entirely his own. You couldn’t have predicted the destination from the starting point. What came out the other side was so distant from Guthrie that it barely seemed connected, yet it grew directly from that immersion.

The Beatles absorbed their influences so completely that what came out the other side was something entirely their own. Thompson copied Fitzgerald and Hemingway so thoroughly that when he wrote, what emerged was unlike anything that had existed before. Not despite the copying. Because of it.

The mistake is trying to skip this stage in the name of originality. Originality isn’t found by avoiding influence. It develops through it, over time, through enough output that the absorbed influences stop being visible and become something harder to name.

What to Do Instead

Stop hiding your influences. Name them, study them, engage with them seriously. The writers and musicians and artists you admire aren’t evidence of your lack of originality. They’re the raw material your originality will eventually grow from. I did this with David Bowie’s Heroes when I recorded my track We’re not actors. I think the influence is still a little raw, but I hope you might find a little art there if you listen.

Pick one piece of work you genuinely love and study it closely. Not just how it makes you feel, but how it works. Copy it, if that’s the medium. Transcribe the chord progression. Sketch the composition. Type out the paragraph. See what you discover that you couldn’t see from the outside.

And when your copy doesn’t quite match the original: pay attention to the space you have created. That’s not failure. That’s the beginning of your own thing.

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