Fiat Currency of the Apocalypse

I’m currently reading ‘The Sheriff’ by M. R. Forbes, and in this post-apocalyptic novel, folks are using a paper currency which is a government stamp on paper for trade. Even paper notes made by the hero who happens to own a stamp. Which is incredibly unrealistic.

A paper currency is  sometimes called ‘fiat currency,’ which means it’s money because some government said it’s money. American dollars these days— on paper or in electronic form— are fiat currency backed by the government. We accept it for practical reasons— that paper or electronic signal may not have intrinsic worth, but we can trade it easily for the stuff we need.

US dollars didn’t used to be fiat currency— at one time it was backed by gold, and you could just take your paper dollars in to a bank and trade them for US gold coins. That didn’t last and FDR actually forbade Americans to own gold. Gold was good because many people accepted that gold was an item of value and would trade for it. And governments can’t print more gold to fake paying their bills.

Fiat currency in the US keeps working because the government that backs it continues to exist in a way that gives people confidence that the dollar has worth. But what would happen in an apocalyptic situation where the government is helpless or disappears altogether? Would people actually trade stuff with survival value for the former government’s approved printed paper?

Here is, in my opinion, the transition of fiat currency in an apocalyptic situation:

Stage 1: People are pretending things are normal in spite of the crisis. They only get worried if they can no longer cash their paychecks or get money out of their bank. The more the government insists that it can bring things back to normal, and doesn’t deliver, the less people trust in government-backed paper money.

Stage 2: The crisis is well upon us. Stores are closed, perhaps forever, some people loot to get needed supplies. Trade, where it exists, is mostly barter, and mostly food or survival items such as guns, milk goats or hand-crank grain grinders. People trade stuff they have a surplus of, for things they need.

Stage 3: Things are getting more stable as some survivors learn to adapt to the new conditions. Since some survivalists have stockpiled gold and silver coins for just such a crisis, some people may take the risk of accepting it in trade, at first perhaps only for non-essential items because there is a risk. People won’t trade food or a gun for mere gold unless they become convinced that they can trade that gold for something useful someday. 

Stage 4: The difficulty of barter is that you may have an item for barter and no one has anything you need or want to trade for it. So things like valued coins or other things used as mediums of exchange will grow in use. These things may be of different types. In some areas the medium of exchange may be bags of rice, or boxes of bullets. Gold and silver coins may be used in some areas and not others. 

Stage 5: This is the part where the survivors have settled in to the task of producing/finding their own food and protecting their own families. They may produce surpluses of things which need to be sold or bartered to obtain other things. Perhaps a stable medium of exchange — precious metal coins, bullets— has been established locally. Fiat currency still won’t be respected, even if government manages to re-emerge. Governments might have to mint their own precious metal coins for a time to pay their soldiers and buy supplies until a more normal life can be established— if it can be.

Fiat currencies, useful as they are right now, are highly unlikely to be respected in an apocalyptic situation. People trying to survive won’t think of bundles of paper money as something they would trade food or useful supplies for. And if a great number of people died in the apocalyptic situation, there may be great bundles of paper money floating around to be scavenged. But would you trade away a can of tuna fish to get a wad of paper money? Probably not, unless you knew for a fact that you could use that paper money somewhere, somehow to get other food. 

Everyone Needs an Encouraging Word

Writers are weird. You see so many of us begging to find a critique group, or get their work critiqued, and then they go off and hire a scam artist calling himself a ‘content editor’ to tell us more of the crap that is wrong with every word we write— and all along we know we’ve all got an ‘inner critic’ perfectly capable of telling us our writing is all crap for free.

What most writers need is encouragement. We don’t believe in ourselves and our work, even the parts we ought to know are good and of higher quality than that produced by many published writers. More critical voices tearing us down are exactly what we DON’T need— unless we are hoping to chuck the whole writing idea because we are No Darn Good at it. 

Quitting writing, though, guarantees failure. Sticking with it means that even if you start out hopelessly bad, you will be getting better, through practice. Maybe you are so dim compared with other wannabe writers that the first 4 novels you write are dreck (pardon my Yiddish.) But if you keep at it, novel #5 will be better, novel #6 will have its good points, and novel #9 will draw fanatic fans. 

Many readers find after a time that their old favorite authors start to feel boring and predictable. These readers may not know it, but what they need is to start trying some new, fresh authors. Because no two authors are the same, and the more authors you try, the more likely you are to find new and exciting stories.

Know this: YOUR writing has its good points, even if it, and you, are weird, off-base, and not like all the other writers. That doesn’t make your ideas bad— it may make them just what readers are looking for.

Imagine this nonsense as a writing idea— a police blood spatter analyst whose hobby is serial killing. Dumb, huh? Yet Jeff Lindsay did pretty well with this ‘dumb’ writing idea in his Dexter series. Your inner critic may be telling you that your current writing is based on ‘dumb’ writing ideas which will only embarrass you if you write them down and show them to anyone. But why are you listening to that inner critic? Throw (metaphorical) rocks at it until it goes away!

If you believe in your writing and your writing ideas, and you put in the work on them, each one will turn out better than you might have imagined, and certainly  better than the critical voices said it would. And why not believe? Your writing comes out of your individual unique self, created by God. And God doesn’t make junk. 

The same goes for the critical voices holding you back in your non-writing life. Maybe you are, objectively, not as good at housekeeping tasks as your mother or grandmother. But you are probably better than those ladies on that hoarder show, right? At least, you are still trying. Which you probably wouldn’t be doing if you gave up and listened to those critical voices. 

Have courage enough to be yourself. Because you are the best person— the only person— who is really good at that job. Don’t let other people or your inner critic paralyze you. Yeah, they say you shouldn’t dare try because you might be less than perfect. Well, you WILL be less than perfect, just like everyone else. But being afraid to try will make your life even less perfect than that. 

Eating Your Daily Frog

In several different self-help books I have read a quotation from Mark Twain, that if the toughest chore you have to do today is eat a frog, eat that frog first thing in the day.

Frog-eating seems to stand in both for the concept of a high-priority task, and for a dreaded task you don’t want to face. Facing such a task first thing in the day, when possible, gets the task out of the way, so you don’t have it hanging over your head, and and gives you a feeling that you really accomplished something.

In your writing life, what ‘frogs’ are coming up? Both in the sense of high-priority task and of dreaded task? I rather dread organizing-type tasks, which is why I don’t outline, but I do have stuff I need to have available like lists of characters and their major characteristics, or places and place names, or what the people in the Old West called their space-alien neighbors…. 

Your writing life doesn’t take place in a vacuum, though. Do you urgently have to cook some meals to freeze for future use, vacuum the living room, persuade a mama cat to raise her kittens somewhere other than a kitchen drawer? Do you have a report due at work or a test to study for in school? These things shouldn’t replace your writing life, but they must be done or your writing life will suffer. 

You have to get good at judging priorities rightly. You can’t let your real life slip because you are putting your writing tasks in first priority all the time. But you also can’t decide that the real life tasks always have a higher priority than your self-imposed writing life. That will not only kill your writing dreams, but make the rest of your life feel less shiny. And if you are a Christian/other person-of-faith who does prayer or devotionals on a daily basis, having a faith-life is a priority also, but you don’t want to have just a faith life. You have to have a clean-enough house and feed your cats/family also. 

As I write this I have just done a ‘frog’ chore I have been dreading and putting off for too many days. It makes me feel great and lessens the depression I’ve had for a while. I even think I can face up to tomorrow’s ‘frog’ chore promptly. 

A Fictional Character’s Psychology: Parent

In my school years I was diagnosed— not as having Asperger Syndrome but as being weird and unhappy, and the school that made the ‘diagnosis’ compelled my parents to take me to the kind of professional that I, at the time, called a headshrinker. One of my better shrinks, knowing I was intelligent, gave me a copy of the book ‘I’m OK, You’re OK,’ which was a popular book about a kind of psychology called ‘Transactional Analysis.’

Transactional Analysis insists that we all have three observable ‘ego states,’ which it calls the Parent, Adult and Child. In other words, your ‘You’ is divided into these three parts. The stuff you (or your fictional characters) say comes in one of these three voices. 

The first of these three ego states is the Parent, which is composed of the memories of the stuff your parents, day care people, teachers and other caregivers said to you in childhood. Even though you think you have forgotten all this stuff, science shows that if the brain is stimulated you can uncover long-buried memories (at least in a lab for experimental purposes.) So it is all still in there.

Your fictional characters, if they are at all human-like, had parental figures in their early lives that influenced them. Even androids— remember how Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation was about his ‘father,’ the human that built him?

No matter how odd your character’s upbringing was, he has memories of what his authority figures said to him in early childhood. He has internalized much of this stuff— because that’s a survival skill. We need to learn to obey those useful parental mandates about not touching a hot stove or borrowing a wizard’s magic wand or playing with phasers. 

Your Parent voice can have wrong or no-longer-accurate information in it as well. What if your character’s parents always said ‘never move in next door to a unicorn,’ because they once bought a house in a declining neighborhood where impoverished unicorns were moving in, but didn’t have the gold to repair their shabby new houses? And you have the chance to move into a house in a good neighborhood, but next door to a corporate CEO unicorn— who is a heck of a fellow and has season tickets to Green Bay Packer games which he shares around the neighborhood. The Parental mandate ‘no unicorn neighbors’ is not up to date in this situation. 

A character with a personal history of massively abusive parents or caregivers will have different Parent content than a person who was raised around loving and kind people. But even loving parents can make a child feel ‘not OK’ because a child has to be corrected and taught a lot of things in childhood, and many of these things are hard to do at first. A little child, learning to tie his shoe for the first time, finds it hard and is dismayed that all the adults in his life can do it so easily. 

Characters speak with their Parent voices often when in a parental or mentoring role, but even little kids have their own Parent mode and can use it— as when a four-year-old child hears his mother asking where the rolling pin is, and says ‘Where did you see it last’ to his mother in Parental mode. People also speak Parent-to-Parent when expressing ‘dogmatic’ Parental judgment on things— ‘the city buses are always late, aren’t they?’  ‘Young people have poor taste in music these days.’

The Parent is an important part of every character, because parents/caregivers are necessary for an infant’s survival. The internalized Parent sayings are an important part of every character you will ever write, so keep the character’s origin story in mind when writing the character— even when you don’t go into that backstory in the story itself.

“Why is my writing broken?”

A lot of writers out there are desperately searching for a critique group, or beta readers, or even a ‘content editor’ to hire, to get some feedback on their work. Many go so far as to post their writing or writing ideas on an internet group and then get frantic when random strangers on the internet are too critical, which means ‘my writing sucks,’ or not critical enough, which means ‘my writing sucks so much that people feel sorry for me.’

This is a post in the Insecure Writer’s Support Group blog hop. To connect with other Insecure Writers, follow this link: https://www.insecurewriterssupportgroup.com/p/iwsg-sign-up.html

What we are looking for in these cases is validation, and our search for validation is usually based on ideas like this: My writing is broken. My writing is broken because I am broken, and so therefore I can never fix my own work myself. Other people— any other people, even strangers on the internet— are not broken so that any thing they say about my work is valid and any criticism they make must trigger yet another rewrite. Because I’m broken and they are not.

Why oh why do so many of us think like that? Well, think back to the days when you were first learning to read/write and were writing down words and phrases for the first time. When you showed your first written sentences to a grownup, that grownup often couldn’t make out what you meant to say. Perhaps because the word ‘cat’ is spelled with fewer sevens than you used. Or some of your letters looked more like other letters than the ones intended. Only a grownup could show you which things needed to be fixed at that baby stage of your learning. 

But now, you are not a little kid any more. You probably can spell many words correctly, or you know how to use a dictionary and spell-check to fix mistakes. You can either write legibly or you use a computer to write so no one needs to know how vile your handwriting is. But inside you is still that tiny learning kid that expects his work to be wrong, and broken, and in need of grown-up fixing. 

Here is the reality— your writing is not ‘broken’ and you are not ‘broken.’ You know things and have skills you didn’t formerly have. And you can learn new stuff any time. If you think your characters are weak, you can read a good book on writing better characters. If you make a lot of typing errors, you can get a typing program and practice every day. 

Other people are not better than you at everything. Just because some near-stranger in your critique group says you can’t write a book about a serial killer who solves crimes because he likes to murder other serial killers doesn’t mean you can’t write that. Just because someone says ‘Amanda’ is a stupid name for a character doesn’t mean you have to change it to Agnes. Believe in your own writing ideas more than you believe in that of others. Because they can’t see inside your head and write your story for you, any more than you can see into another writer’s head.

Also, when you learn for yourself to correct flaws in your work, you learn to see the difference between a real flaw and just something that some random person didn’t like. Spelling ‘cat’ as ‘ka777’ is a real flaw (except perhaps in avant-garde poetry,) making your starship captain a talking cat is more a matter of taste. 

I think sometimes that the main difference between the ‘real’ writers and the eternal beginners is not in skill or talent, but merely in the fact that ‘real’ writers believe in themselves and their work— enough, at least, to keep going and to submit or publish their works. I have read big whoppers of mistakes in early works of big-name writers— a writer who created a metal-poor world in which the hay was still kept in hay bales, implying the existence of hay balers which require lots of metal to make. Or the very young writer who implied that a 30-year-old character was old and decrepit. These mistakes made it into print, and these writers made a living in writing anyway. 

So don’t fear mistakes so much you feel ‘broken!’ Your ‘broken’ writing may attract readers that love your work and want more.