Copying gets you started. Adding something nobody else thought of gets you remembered.

Imitation is the fastest way to learn a form, and nearly everyone good began by reproducing someone else closely. The mistake is stopping there, because a perfect copy has no reason to exist. What makes work yours is the small deviation you introduce once you understand the rules well enough to break one.

Keep copying while you are learning, and start noting the places where you would have done it differently. Try one of those changes on purpose in the next thing you make. That single difference is where your own version begins.