Story Ideas from Magdalena Ball for Editors, Staff Writers, Producers, and Media Hosts
Find controversial and thoughtful stories from Magdalena Ball that fit with the next breaking news story. Please contact Magdalena if you'd like a story written around one of these topics for your publication, or would like to organise an interview around one of these topics, or something related.
Related to Sleep Before Evening
The Redemptive Nature of Art -- This one picks up on the major theme of the book, and deals with issues around how we create meaning in our lives.
What is Literary Fiction -- On the relationship between literary fiction and genre fiction.
The father figure crisis in modern urban societies -- This is one of the issues that Sleep Before Evening explores in detail. Divorce and family breakdown is a pervasive fact of modern life, but there haven't been too many literary (as opposed to academic) explorations of the topic, which has relevance to a wide range of readers.
Chess as a metaphor for life -- My heroine is a chess player, and her grandfather has a stroke during their weekly chess match. Chess, both literally, and metaphorically, is prevalent through the book.
Fiction or Faction -- the relationship between the truth, and the fictive dream. This has become something of a hot topic at the moment, with authors getting accused of plagiarism, and the lines between nonfiction and fiction blurring.
On Creativity and midlife -- how to combine responsibility with self-actualisation. My novel is all about a teenager finding herself, but there is also an artist mother -- who, at midlife, must come to terms with who she is, and find a way to reconcile herself artistically with her sense of herself as a mother.
Related to Quark Soup
Quantum Art -- Harkening explores these subject. The next time an author gets busted for plagiarizing (and we know it's sure to happen) let Carolyn Howard-Johnson talk about how truth--in even the most basic of newstories--is filtered through more than one set of eyes, more than one writing technique.
On the Academic World and Poetic Accessibility -- Though it takes on an esoteric subject, the poetry in Quark Soup has been described as absolutely accessible. That doesn't mean simple. But it does mean that the ultimate aims of the poems are around the creation of meaning, not about clever referencing and sophistication for its own sake.
"It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there" On the ongoing value of poetry and why it's the difference between life and death.
What Do Quantum Physics and the Midlife Crisis Have in Common? An article which should fit both literary publications and those related to men and women's health.
What Does the Birth of the Universe Have in Common with the Birth of a Child? An idea suitable for parenting magazines, as well as literary ones.
Related to The Art of Assessment: How to Review Anything
On the Value of the Honest Critique -- This is a topical idea as many publications have started charging for reviews, and closing down sections for commercial reasons.
On Declining Literacy Levels and the Harry Potter Phenomenon -- a look at the power of books to change children's lives.
On the Increasing Power of the Informed (and Uninformed) Blogger to Shape Opinion -- a look at blogging and why it is both an egalitarian form of people power, and the lurking dangers.