leap from imitation to invention

Well, the last few posts were quite cantankerous! Now back to our regularly scheduled program.

Since my Master's, I've been talking about the cycle of construction and deconstruction. People learn by making, yes, but they also learn by taking apart. They look at examples, copy them, tweak them, in order to understand and make things. Feynman talks about taking radios apart. Programmers find example code online or in reference books and work from there. Writers read other writers. Programmers code and debug and code again. Writers write, edit, rewrite. The process of creation is cyclical.

My unsolved question of the day is how does the leap occur between working from examples to invention? Take poetry for example. Say I'm a teenager who reads a lot of Sylvia Plath. All of my poems are in Plath's style. As I start to read Louise Gluck, my style starts to copy hers. I'm learning about language and poetry through this imitation and also expressing myself. At some point, I start to develop my own style of writing, my voice, through modifying the styles I've been copying. How does this transition happen, and does it always happen?

What happens in the space between imitation and invention?