It was in grad school that I first heard mention of artistic “process.” “What’s your process?” was a favorite question posed by zealous grad students to famous writers paid thousands of dollars to read from their work for forty-five minutes in a musty auditorium.

I always rolled my eyes when someone asked these kinds of questions. It seemed like asking Michelangelo what brand of brushes he used on the Sistine Chapel or what kind of guitar Bob Dylan played in “Tangled Up in Blue.” The question seemed to cheapen the achievement, as though the magic were in the equipment, not the person.

A friend of mine once saw novelist and MacArthur Genius Grant recipient David Foster Wallace give a reading at a bookstore. During the Q&A following the reading, he was peppered with questions about his writing habits (pen or pencil? Do you work in the morning or late at night?). He tried to deflect and demur, but the audience continued to pump him for info about his process, until finally he threatened to leave the podium if one more person asked such a question. The final questioner also inquired after his personal writing habits, and so he turned and walked away.

I don’t know that there is a moral to this story, but I think it is safe to say that David Foster Wallace’s view was that he didn’t spend hundreds upon hundreds of hours toiling away on his complex and erudite novels with the intention of traveling the country having conversations about the word processing program he used.

Fast forward to my own recent life, and you’ll find me chagrined. I spent this morning trying to convince the education reporter for the Washington Post to do a story on the summer arts program I am directing– based on the fact that much of the work being done is aided by the iPad.

The question I once thought I knew the answer to is this: “Does the equipment matter?” Does it matter if the most recent New Yorker cover was “painted” using an iPad app, or that the latest Gorillaz album was recorded and mixed entirely on an iPad?

Apocryphal stories abound of amazing feats of artistry carried off using less-than-ideal equipment. My favorite is one about Charlie Parker playing a plastic toy saxophone on the legendary “Live at Massey Hall” recording, because he pawned his real horn to feed his heroin addiction. As it turns out, according to jazz historian Phil Schapp, Parker owned more than one of these plastic horns and played them not because his real one was in hock, but because he liked the particular timbre of the sound.

I’m reminded now of Jack Kerouac and the infamous scroll of paper on which he supposedly wrote On the Roadin three weeks’ time while on an amphetamine binge. Contrary to the legend that haunts many young writers, it turns out that between the initial drafting of the novel on the 120-foot-long scroll in 1951 and its publication in 1957, the manuscript underwent significant revision.

Discovering the truth about Parker’s plastic sax and Kerouac’s scroll were watershed moments for me, helping me to see Parker and Kerouac as great craftsmen making interesting (sometimes unorthodox) choices during the creation of their work.

Once in a class in grad school, we were given a prompt that went something like this: “Reflect on your process as a writer and discuss the ways that it enables or stands in the way of realizing your vision.” I sighed and rolled my eyes and then sat there in my chair for a long time, pen poised above the page imagining my apartment and the desk where I worked: the brimming ashtray, the sticky tumbler of Jameson whiskey near the mouse pad, the thick, heavy, brown bottles of Iron City beer crowding around the keyboard. Chet Baker singing “My Funny Valentine” on WDUQ. A police cruiser screaming past. A small cockroach, lured by the sweet smell of alcohol, climbing on to the desk to look around.

After several minutes we were asked to share what we had written. The results were eye-opening; not one resembled mine, which on the one hand gave me a sense of self-satisfaction, but on the other, as more and more of my classmates shared, I began to see that my “process” was built on dulling my senses to the point where I no longer had to exercise any sort of will whatsoever.

To me, the goal was to cultivate effortlessness. Tobacco and alcohol quieted doubt, but also discernment, and so upon finishing a story I felt certain that it was finished; that nothing more was required of me.

For the last two weeks, I have been constantly worried that the iPad, a device that every student in the summer program that I am currently directing uses to read, research, and compose on, will create for some the same illusion of mastery and control I felt as a young writer. I’ve been worrying that the sleek and sexy interface aestheticizes the process of making art (making creativity voguish); that the iPad, like the booze and cigarettes I consumed, merely accessorizes creativity, instead of truly fostering it.

Only time will tell, but I’m heartened by what I’ve seen so far. I’ve seen students using their iPads as both a canvas to paint on and a mirror to paint their self-portrait. I’ve seen them use the video camera to record the oral histories of barber shop patrons in the small town bordering our campus. I’ve seen them used to track down the names of bird calls and species of trees encountered on a nature hike.

Never before has art been shared so easily and widely across such impossible distances and at such impossible speeds. As a result, the cultural impact of the artist is actually tangible, measurable, by “hits,” by the number of times it has been “shared,” hopefully eliminating some of the angst I know I felt as a young artist, wallowing in my anonymity.

And while devices like the iPad will never eliminate the time and attention necessary for artists to learn their craft well, they will–they are, I think–contributing to the transformation of the artist into more of a socially engaged, visible, and accepted figure.