I am not an architect. But I married an analytical mind to a creative pursuit, and somewhere in the collision between strategy consulting and magic performance, I started thinking about shows the way an architect thinks about buildings.
A building has a blueprint. Every room, every hallway, every staircase exists for a reason and in a specific relationship to every other element. The kitchen is near the dining room. The bedroom is far from the street. The entryway is designed to create a first impression. Nothing is random. Nothing is accidental. Everything is planned to create a specific experience for the person moving through the space.
For the first couple of years of my performing life, my show had no blueprint. It had effects. Good effects, well-practiced effects, effects that produced genuine reactions. But the arrangement of those effects was closer to a collection than an architecture. I had assembled a playlist, not composed a symphony.
The moment that changed was the night I sat down with a piece of graph paper and tried to draw what my show actually felt like.
The Graph Paper Experiment
This was in a hotel room in Graz, after a corporate performance that had gone well by most measures — the audience was engaged, the effects landed, the client was happy. But I had that nagging feeling that something structural was off. The show felt uneven. There were moments of genuine electricity followed by stretches where the energy settled, followed by another spike, followed by another settle. It was entertaining. But it was not building.
I took a piece of graph paper — I always have grid paper in my consulting bag — and drew two axes. The horizontal axis was time, divided into the approximate minutes of my set. The vertical axis was emotional intensity, from zero at the bottom to maximum at the top.
Then I tried to plot, as honestly as I could, the emotional arc of the show I had just performed. Not what I intended. What actually happened, based on the audience reactions I had observed and the recording I had watched afterward.
What I drew looked like a city skyline.
Random peaks and valleys. A tall building here, a short one there, a gap, another tower, a dip, a medium building, and then one more tower at the end that was roughly the same height as the tallest one in the middle. There was no discernible pattern. No direction. No momentum. Just a series of independent structures standing next to each other, each doing its own thing.
This was not an arc. This was a scatter plot.
What an Arc Should Look Like
I stared at that graph for a long time. Then, next to it, I drew what I wanted the emotional arc to look like.
It started low — not boring, but measured. Engaging enough to hold attention, but clearly the beginning of something, not the peak. Then it rose, gradually and almost imperceptibly at first, through a series of steps. Each step was slightly higher than the last. There were small dips between steps — moments of release, of laughter, of breathing room — but the overall trajectory was unmistakably upward. And at the far right of the graph, the line rose sharply to its highest point, held there for a single beat, and then dropped.
That was the mountain. Not a skyline. A mountain. A single peak with everything else sloping upward toward it.
The gap between what I had drawn and what I wanted was enormous. And seeing it on paper — literally seeing the shape of my show versus the shape I was aiming for — was one of the most clarifying moments of my performing life.
The City Skyline Problem
Why did my show look like a skyline instead of a mountain? Because I had assembled it the way most performers assemble their sets: I chose my best effects, I put them in an order that seemed logical, and I performed them. Each effect was a building. Each building was designed individually. But nobody had designed the skyline.
The skyline problem is endemic in magic. Performers think in terms of individual effects: “This is a strong piece. This is a fun piece. This is my closer.” They rehearse each piece to a high standard. But the relationship between the pieces — the transitions, the escalation, the emotional trajectory from beginning to end — receives almost no attention.
It is like a chef who perfects ten dishes individually but never considers the menu as a whole. Each dish might be excellent. But served in the wrong order, at the wrong pace, with the wrong pairings, the meal is a mess.
Darwin Ortiz crystallized this for me with his suspense formula: “Make them care, then make them wait.” That formula works within a single routine — you establish stakes, then delay the resolution. But it also works across an entire show. The first half of the show makes them care. The second half makes them wait. And the closer delivers.
If your emotional arc is a skyline, you are delivering and delivering and delivering without ever building the sustained anticipation that makes the final delivery devastating. You are releasing pressure every five minutes instead of letting it accumulate to the breaking point.
Mapping the Internal Arc vs. the Overall Arc
One of the most important discoveries from the graph paper exercise was that there are two arcs operating simultaneously in every show, and both need the same architectural attention.
The first is the internal arc — the emotional trajectory within a single routine. Every effect has its own build. There is a setup that establishes the situation. There is a development that raises the stakes. There is a climax that delivers the payoff. Within a five-minute routine, this arc should be clear and deliberate.
The second is the overall arc — the emotional trajectory across the entire show. This is the macro structure that most performers neglect. Where does the show start emotionally? Where does it end? What is the shape of the journey between those two points?
The critical insight is that the internal arcs must serve the overall arc. If a routine in the middle of your show has an internal climax that is higher than the overall climax of the show, you have a structural problem. That routine’s peak is competing with the show’s peak. It is a skyscraper in the middle of your mountain, and it disrupts the slope.
This does not mean the middle routines should be flat. They should have internal arcs — rises and climaxes of their own. But their peaks should be calibrated to be lower than the show’s final peak. Each internal climax should be a step on the staircase, not a destination in itself.
On my graph paper, I started drawing the internal arcs as small waves within the larger wave. Each routine had its own little peak and valley, but the peaks were progressively higher, and the valleys were progressively shallower. The overall effect was a rising wave pattern — undulating but unmistakably climbing.
The Baseline Problem
Another thing the graph revealed was that I had no consistent baseline. The emotional intensity of my show was bouncing between three and eight, apparently at random. There was no floor to push off from.
A well-designed arc needs a baseline — a stable emotional level that the audience settles into between peaks. This baseline is where the audience processes what they just experienced, catches their breath, and resets for the next escalation. Without a baseline, the peaks have no contrast. Without contrast, the peaks do not feel like peaks.
I learned to establish my baseline in the first two minutes of the show. That opening stretch — before the first real effect — sets the emotional floor. It says to the audience: “This is the starting point. This is normal. Everything above this line is special.”
Then, when the first effect lands and the emotional intensity rises above the baseline, the audience registers it as an escalation. When the energy dips back toward the baseline between effects, the audience reads it as a valley — a natural rest that prepares them for the next rise. The baseline gives meaning to the peaks.
In my original skyline show, the baseline was nonexistent because I started too high. The first effect was already at an eight, which meant there was nowhere to go but sideways or down. By establishing a baseline at a four or five — warm, engaging, interesting but not yet astonishing — I gave myself five full levels of escalation to work with.
Redesigning the Arc
Armed with the graph paper diagnosis, I spent the next several weeks rebuilding my show’s architecture from the ground up.
Step one was establishing the baseline. I rewrote my opening two minutes to be warmer, more personal, more conversational. Less “watch this amazing thing” and more “let me tell you something interesting.” This brought the starting intensity down to a five — high enough to hold attention, low enough to climb from.
Step two was creating the slow climb through the middle. I took the seven effects in my set and rearranged them so that each one raised the emotional intensity by approximately one point on my ten-point scale. The second effect was a six. The third was a seven. The fourth was a seven-and-a-half. The progression was gentle enough that the audience did not feel manipulated, but steady enough that by the midpoint of the show, the energy in the room was palpably different from where it had started.
Step three was engineering the final ascent. The last two effects in my set were my strongest material, and I structured them as a one-two punch. The penultimate effect was my second-strongest piece — a strong moment that brought the intensity to a nine. Then, instead of immediately launching into the closer, I inserted a brief moment of connection. A personal comment. A moment of eye contact with the audience. A beat of humanity that allowed the energy to hover at its peak without releasing.
And then the closer. Not a step up from nine to ten. A leap. A reveal that took everything the audience had been feeling — the accumulated investment of twenty-five minutes of escalating engagement — and compressed it into a single, explosive moment.
The first time I performed the redesigned arc, I felt the difference in my bones. The audience was not just reacting to individual effects. They were on a ride. They could feel the trajectory even though they could not name it. The room got progressively more electric as the show went on, not because each effect was inherently stronger than the last — though they were, slightly — but because the architecture was doing its job. The structure was creating the experience.
Drawing Your Own Arc
I recommend the graph paper exercise to everyone I talk to about performance. Not because it is a revolutionary technique — it is embarrassingly simple. But because the act of drawing your show’s emotional arc forces you to confront the reality of your structure rather than the story you tell yourself about your structure.
Most performers believe their show builds to a climax. When they draw the actual arc, they discover it does not. It meanders. It spikes and drops. It has a city skyline where it should have a mountain.
The drawing does not fix the problem. But it diagnoses it with a clarity that no amount of abstract thinking can achieve. Once you see the shape of your show on paper, you cannot unsee it. And once you cannot unsee it, you are compelled to reshape it.
Draw the arc you have. Then draw the arc you want. Then figure out what needs to change to close the gap.
It might be sequencing — moving your strongest material to the end and your opening material down a notch. It might be pacing — inserting valleys between your peaks so the peaks have contrast. It might be calibration — toning down a middle effect that is peaking too high and competing with the closer. It might be cutting — removing an effect that creates a dip in the trajectory that you cannot recover from.
Whatever it is, you will not find it by thinking about your show in the abstract. You will find it by mapping it. By making the invisible visible. By treating your show not as a collection of moments but as an architecture — a structure designed to create a specific emotional experience that culminates in a single, unforgettable peak.
That peak is your mountaintop. Everything else is the path to it. And the path needs to be designed with the same care, the same intentionality, and the same architectural precision as the peak itself.
Because the audience does not experience individual effects. They experience the arc. And the arc is either a skyline or a mountain. There is no third option.