I recommend this to any creative person in any discipline. If you’re a painter and you can’t think of anything to paint, copy a landscape or a portrait by a painter you like. If you’re a writer and you feel like you’re not capable of writing something new, find a poem you like and type it out again. If you’re a chef and you’re drawing a blank in

Stylistic imitation is one thing, a perfectly honorable way to get started as a writer (and impossible to avoid, really; some sort of imitation marks each new stage of a writer’s development), but one cannot imitate a writer’s approach to a particular genre, no matter how simple what that writer is doing may seem.