When Grace, one of the authors of this article, was a child, she asked her father – an English professor – to read the same books aloud so many times that he eventually committed the narration to audio tape. These stories wove in her mind a tapestry of successive events that unfolded in her imagination. Characters accomplished wild and courageous feats the likes of which she could only dream of emulating, and wondrous things zipped in and around the narration.

For most children and student writers, it is this power of stories – to captivate and bewitch – that inspires their own attempts to create narratives of their own. However, this belief in the magical power of stories simultaneously cultivates in any aspiring artist, but perhaps especially in writers, the sense that they must be hit with a kind of lightning-like inspiration to be able to conjure a text like those that inspired their own novitiate efforts at writing.

This belief mirrors one of the major misconceptions plaguing creativity research. Recently, Plucker, Beghetto, and Dow (2004) suggested that a primary challenge facing the field of creativity research remains the myth that “people are born creative or uncreative” (p. 85). In a similar vein, Sternberg and Lubart (1999) have expressed concern about the “mystification of creativity.”

In this chapter, we examine how this “mystification of creativity” has been derived from a traditional theoretical emphasis on instances of eminent creativity and, further, how this focus has influenced the belief systems of creative writers about their capacity to produce written creative texts, or products.