Ode to Shitty First Attempts

The terrible pictures behind my favorite tall ship photo

I set my phone lock screen to this photo for five years straight. I took it when I was 17, during sunset in Westport, WA, through the headrig of the Lady Washington—a wooden brig, Washington’s official state tall ship, and where I worked as a deckhand in the Summer of 2018.

Lady Washington’s headrig—the spars and rigging forward of the bow—is distinctive. Unlike most other modern tall ships, it has no bow net, just foot ropes, so there’s nothing between you and the water except an inch of tarred rope when working out in the rig. And it has a spritsail, which, according to Collins Dictionary, is medieval:

Which is not entirely true. Headrig spritsails may have originated in medieval times, but they lasted a lot longer, even into the late 18th century when the original Lady Washington—a sloop later refitted as a brig—became the first American-flagged in the Pacific.

I love the photo because it captures the Lady’s unique headrig. But even more than the rigging, it captures the sense of wonder I felt when I first started working on tall ships. Not every picture I took that Summer does. Not even close.

I took this photo the same night from the brig’s topsail yard, and I thought it was an Ansel Adams until I got back on deck.

I thought this photo encompassed the romance of working aloft in the moonlight, not a blurry port parking lot and a bad furl.

And I was sure this one was in focus. Just to list a few.

“For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.”

-Anne Lamott

I first read Anne Lamott’s “Shitty First Drafts” six years after I took the sunset photo of the Lady Washington’s headrig. My phone lock screen was a different boat then, and I was finishing a degree in outdoor education back home in Colorado and working as a TA for a freshman Honors class about the power of story. Another professor must have used Lamott’s essay for a class in the same room because I found a copy half-crumpled under a desk.

In it, Lamott voices something challenging to admit but infinitesimally true: very few of us are good at anything without being bad at it first.

“Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts.”

-Anne Lamott

One of the things I most love about writing is the ability to revise, but not everything has as much adjustability. Sometimes, the only way to do it better is to do it again. To start over. To take more photos.

Failure is a part of the experiential learning cycle. Doing something badly is a prerequisite to doing it well.

So here’s to shitty first drafts and shitty first attempts alike. They both get better.