Every serious young writer we have worked with has loved something first.
Not their own story. Someone else's. A world they did not build but visited so many times they began to feel like they lived there.
For a lot of the children who come to us, that world is Harry Potter. Sometimes it is Percy Jackson. Often it is both, and the child is already comparing Hogwarts to Camp Half-Blood with the intensity most adults bring to strong opinions.
Parents sometimes worry about this. They wonder if a child who is obsessed with a series will only ever imitate it. They ask whether all that re-reading is leading anywhere.
It is.
The phase that looks like copying
When a child loves a world deeply, the first thing they want to do is write more of it. More adventures, different characters, scenes that went a different way. This looks like imitation because it is. And that is not a problem to fix. It is how writers have always learned.
You do not learn to swim by reading about it. You learn to write by writing, and writing stories that rhyme with stories you love is writing.
The real question is not whether a child starts by borrowing. Every writer does. The question is whether they eventually start to trust what is uniquely their own.
When the turn happens
Ashvik Bansal is 11, from Delhi. His love of reading was ignited by Percy Jackson and Harry Potter. Both series do the same thing: they take a young person who feels ordinary and drop them into a world where everything is at stake. Ashvik absorbed that deeply. Then he started writing his own stories, and what came out was something distinct. He writes in layers, each chapter shifting flavour like his favourite ice cream, full of twists that keep changing what the reader thought they knew. That is not Percy Jackson. That is Ashvik.
The structure he reaches for is his own. The way he builds suspense is his own rhythm.
Jayaditya Chhabra is 10, also from Delhi, and Harry Potter shaped how he sees stories. He loves fantasy and humour in roughly equal measure. When he is not at the cricket pitch, he is drawing and painting and dreaming up adventures. All of that shows up in his work: the physical energy, the visual sense, the commitment to having fun with it. When we describe his writing, we say: expect fantasy with a sense of fun. That is a signature. That is a voice.
Neither of them is writing Harry Potter. Neither is trying to.
What made the difference
In both cases, the shift from fan to original creator did not happen because someone told them to stop loving what they loved. It happened because they were given room to keep going.
Write the next chapter, then write a story with your own world and your own rules. What would your world be like? What does your character want that a character from another book has not already wanted?
Those are not difficult questions for a child who has spent years inside someone else's imagination. They have been thinking about worlds all along. They just had not been handed a blank page and told it was theirs yet.
When you take that step, the inventions come quickly.
If your child is re-reading a favourite series again and again and narrating their own version at dinner, you are not looking at a child who lacks imagination. You are looking at a child who is building a reading life, which is almost always where writing starts.
The imitation phase is not the obstacle to originality. It is the path to it.
Both Ashvik and Jayaditya have stories in Whispers of Many Worlds. They came to us as readers of other people's worlds. They left as authors of their own.
