writing as a jellyfish bloom

A jellyfish bloom is when you have so many ideas for things you want to write and the ideas all seem so good and so pretty that you can’t pick just one, and so you just sit there and stare at the spectacle and maybe even tell someone else about all the good ideas you are having, but you do not go into the water and you do not write a single paragraph, a single sentence, a single word.

No, wait—that’s not it. A jellyfish bloom is an occurrence involving an overabundance of jellyfish in a specific area of the ocean. The blooms are caused by eutrophication, climate change, overfishing, alien invasions, and habit modifications. The jellyfish are not the blame. They are the symptom of something bigger being out of balance.

But what about a notebook, overrun with little nuggets of stories you could tell, poems you could craft, bits of your own life or lives you’ve observed that you feel could be teased out into something more substantial?

Writing as a jellyfish bloom: so startlingly beautiful from far away, a bevy of ideas, colliding and collaborating, waiting for discovery. Up close, a different situation—so many concepts, so hard to navigate. Insecurity about which ones to follow through on, which ones to leave behind. Realization that these things, these tentacles of creativity, cannot ever be controlled.

It’s the opposite of writer’s block, with the same result. You have more ideas than you know what to do with. You are frozen in place by all the possibilities.

The only choice you are left with is to keep moving, to keep sorting through the bodies and the words, waiting to get so close to one that it stings. Your arm brushes up against a will-less tentacle, in the middle of composing the third paragraph of a willfully wild first draft, and the tentacle involuntarily releases a microscopic barbed stinger containing a tiny bulb full of venom. The tube shoots out of the bulb, penetrating the skin and the pages of the notebook, releasing the venom.

Now it’s time to let the poison work through you, to let the words pour out of you, to keep working, drafting, revising, drafting, revising, until you have outrun the pain and the shock and the death, until the pages are full but the ocean is empty once more, and the cycle is free to start over.