Let's Talk About Wedgies, Writers

The wedgie.

It's the ultimate tv trope.

Give someone a wedgie and there are only two possibilities:

1. You're a bully
2. You're getting revenge on a bully.

In the U.S. culture wedgies are instantly recognizable and understandable. There are even three wedgie variations:

The Melvin, in which the undies are yanked up from the front.
The Atomic Wedgie, in which the undies are pulled over the head.
The Hanging Wedgie, in which the victim is suspended from an object by their underwear.
TV TROPES

But wedgies can be sinister jerks that are not just a trope for literature or tv so that us writer people can easily show someone being a jerk.

They happen in real life, too.

There are people who have wedgie fetishes, actually. There is also the occurrence called the accidental-self-induced wedgie.

And they can have consequences!

About ten years ago, a bunch of scientific articles were written about a man, 50, who had some bad back pain. His left leg and five toes on that left foot tingled and were numb.

Why?

His 34-year-old wife gave him a wedgie when he was finally getting up off the sofa. For six years, he had those symptoms if he put his full weight on his left leg.

His wife no longer gave him wedgies, by the way.

What does this have to do with writing you might wonder?

WRITING TIP OF THE POD

Something even as simple as a wedgie can have nuance and consequence and as writers we have to look deeply inside our underwear story and see what symbols and actions we're using. Are we putting a wedgie incident in there because it's the easy way to show someone being a poop monster? Are we fully thinking out the consequences of our character's choices and of what happens to a person's body when they get a really bad wedgie?

Dog tip for life

You don't have to worry about wedgies if you don't wear underwear.

SHOUT OUT

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.

IN THE WOODS – READ AN EXCERPT, PREORDER NOW!

My next book, IN THE WOODS, appears in July with Steve Wedel. It’s scary and one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Buzz Books for Summer 2019. There’s an excerpt of it there and everything! But even cooler (for me) they’ve deemed it buzz worthy! Buzz worthy seems like an awesome thing to be deemed!

You can preorder this bad boy, which might make it have a sequel. The sequel would be amazing. Believe me, I know. It features caves and monsters and love. Because doesn’t every story?