It is an issue that any real dedicated artist or creator will eventually face. For me, it came in the form of people who I saw as stealing my style. During high school when I first started to get serious with my writing I began the practice of writing inspirational quotes on teachers white boards across my school. I became quite well known for it and it earned me my role as my schools motivational speaker/writer. A few years into this endeavor I had started to slow down my quotes as I no longer had the time to focus on them. To my surprise, people were still writing quotes though on teachers boards. When I found out about this I was admittedly not all that happy. To me that had been my thing and now people were stealing my thunder! I couldn't let that happen. What further shocked me was what my art teacher whom I had expected to understand my anger at this "plagiarism", as I called it, told me a simple saying. "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery".
If you are an artist, writer or some other creator I almost guarantee you will have to deal with imitation eventually, though which side of the spectrum you are on may be different. To the creator who is being emulated though, here is some advice. There are fine lines between stealing and inspiring. To further understand this you must consider why people imitate in the first place. It can really be chalked up to three simple things:To improve, to learn and to respect.
Imitation many times is a result of people attempting to improve on what work that has already been set. If you have developed some kind of style and someone else is trying to follow it, maybe while putting their own spin on it, you should pay close attention to this not out of anger but out of curiosity. See what they are doing with your format and how they are improving it for themselves. You can then work on your own improvements from there and learn how to better yourself. The best feedback for you always comes from a better you.
Have you ever been in a creative slump? I would say that most people who are truly dedicated to their work are 90% of the time. You know what is a great way to get out of creative slumps? By taking the hands of others to rise up. Many people who imitate are doing just that. They are unsure of where to go next and so they turn to someone else for inspiration and to learn from them. When a teacher first explained this concept to me, I thought it was petty. The idea that they wanted me to borrow the ideas of someone else was so disgusting. Yet it resulted in me writing one of my greatest poems so far and improving literally everything about how I write lyrical verses.
The final idea takes us back to the idea that my teacher told me. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. It's a common saying that doesn't hold much to most people. Once you have seen how true it is though, it becomes something you live by. If someone is taking the time to try to be like someone else, that must be that the person they are imitating must be doing something right. When I met the people who had been making quotes they weren't greedy people trying to hog spotlight. They were people who had just been inspired by what I had said and thought what I was doing was so great that someone had to keep it going. I do not think I have ever felt prouder than then.
In summary, imitation should not be something that offends you. It is at its heart just a sign that you are doing something right. So don't freak out when someone starts trying to be more like you. Just continue to become better and better and soon you will find nobody can ever truly be like someone as unique as you.
