I already knew what I was going to say. That was my position on scripting for longer than I care to admit.
The logic seemed airtight. I had been performing the same routines for months. I knew every beat, every pause, every transition. The words came naturally — they flowed out of me in the moment, responsive to the audience, authentic, alive. Writing a script would only make things stiff. It would kill the spontaneity that made my performances feel real. It would turn me into a robot reciting lines instead of a person connecting with other people.
This is the story of how spectacularly wrong I was.
The Video That Ended My Delusion
It happened in Linz, at a corporate event for an engineering firm. I had asked a friend to record my set on his phone — nothing fancy, just a static shot from the back of the room. I wanted to see my blocking, check whether my angles were clean, maybe catch a few moments where I could tighten my timing.
What I got instead was twenty-three minutes of evidence that destroyed my self-image as a performer.
The first thing I noticed was the repetition. Not just occasional repetition — systematic, compulsive repetition. I used the phrase “what I want you to do” eleven times. Eleven. I counted. I also said “basically” more times than I could track, deployed “right?” as a verbal punctuation mark after nearly every instruction, and had a habit of narrating my own actions in real time: “So I’m going to take the cards and I’m going to shuffle them and now I’m going to spread them out…”
The audience could see what I was doing. They did not need a commentary track.
But the repetition was not the worst of it. The worst was the rambling. Between effects, during what should have been clean transitions, I would wander into extended tangents that had no destination. I would start a thought, lose the thread, circle back, pick up a different thought, and somehow arrive at the next effect having said a lot of words that accomplished nothing. In one particularly painful stretch, I spent nearly two minutes talking about the history of a prop without making a single point that was interesting, funny, or relevant to what was about to happen.
I watched that video in my hotel room with growing horror. And then I watched it again. And again. Because the third viewing is where you stop defending yourself and start actually seeing what happened.
What happened was this: I had been performing without a script, and my performance sounded exactly like what it was — someone making it up as he went along.
The Resistance
Let me be honest about why I resisted scripting for so long.
First, scripting felt like homework. I am a strategy consultant. My days are filled with documents, frameworks, and carefully constructed presentations. Magic was supposed to be the escape from all that structured thinking. Writing dialogue for a card routine felt like bringing work into the one space I had carved out for play.
Second, scripting felt like it would kill authenticity. The performers I admired seemed effortless, speaking from the heart. Writing a script seemed like the opposite of that — premeditated and artificial.
Third — and this is the one I am least proud of — scripting felt like it was for beginners. I had routines that worked. Writing a script felt like going backward, like admitting what I was doing was not good enough.
That video in Linz blew through all three objections in twenty-three minutes.
The Idea That Changed My Mind
Around this time, I picked up Pete McCabe’s Scripting Magic, a book that approaches the craft of writing for magic performances with a seriousness I had not expected. McCabe makes a point early on that stopped me cold: you already script every trick you do. If you always say roughly the same things during a routine, you have a script. You just have an accidental script instead of a deliberate one.
That reframing was the key that unlocked everything for me. The question was never “should I script or not?” The question was always “do I want my script to be designed or do I want it to be an accident?”
Put it in business terms, because that is how my brain works: would you walk into a board presentation and just wing it? Would you pitch a million-euro strategy to a client without preparing your talking points, your structure, your key messages? Of course not. The stakes are too high. The presentation matters too much.
So why was I treating my magic performances — performances I cared deeply about, performances that represented Vulpine Creations to the world — as if they were casual conversations that needed no preparation?
The answer, of course, was ego. I thought my natural speaking ability was sufficient. I thought my comfort with public speaking from years of consulting and keynotes would carry me. And to some extent it did — I was not terrible. I was just nowhere near as good as I could have been.
The First Script
I started with a single routine. A mentalism piece I had been performing at corporate events for about six months. I chose it because it was the routine I felt most confident about, which meant it would hurt the most to discover it needed work.
I sat down at the desk in a hotel room in Salzburg — where else? — with a laptop and a blank document. And I wrote down, word for word, what I actually said during that routine. Not what I thought I said. Not the idealized version in my head. What I actually said, based on the video recordings I had been forcing myself to watch.
It was brutal. On paper, stripped of my delivery and personality and the live energy of a room, the words looked empty. Whole paragraphs of setup that could have been two sentences. Instructions that were vague and meandering when they needed to be sharp. Jokes that were not actually jokes — just mildly amusing observations that I lingered on because the audience was being polite.
Then I wrote a second version. The deliberate version. The version where every sentence had a reason to exist.
I asked myself three questions about each line. Does this advance the routine? Does this create interest, humor, or anticipation? Does the audience need to hear this, or am I saying it for my own comfort?
That third question was the killer. So much of what I had been saying was for my own comfort. Filling silence because silence made me nervous. Narrating actions because it gave me something to do with my voice. Repeating instructions because I was not confident the audience had understood the first time — when in reality, they had understood perfectly and my repetition was insulting their intelligence.
The deliberate version was about forty percent shorter than the accidental version. Not because I had cut content. Because I had cut noise.
The Difference in the Room
I performed the scripted version for the first time at an event in Graz. A tech company’s leadership retreat, forty people, theater-style seating, good acoustics. Everything about the venue was comparable to the Linz event where I had filmed myself.
The difference was immediate and unmistakable.
Not in the audience’s reaction — though that was better too. The difference was in me. I knew exactly where I was going. Every sentence had a destination. Every pause was intentional. I was not searching for words, not filling gaps, not circling back to points I had already made. The cognitive load dropped dramatically, and all that freed-up mental bandwidth went exactly where it should have gone: to the audience.
I could watch faces. I could read the room. I could adjust my pacing based on their energy instead of based on my own anxiety about what to say next. I could actually be present, because the script had freed me from the burden of invention.
This was the revelation that none of the books had prepared me for. Everyone talks about scripting in terms of what the audience hears. Nobody told me that the biggest beneficiary of a good script is the performer. The script is not just about making your words better. It is about freeing your brain to do everything else that a live performance demands.
The Spontaneity Paradox
Here is the thing that will sound contradictory but is absolutely true: my scripted performances are more spontaneous than my unscripted ones ever were.
When I was winging it, I was actually less free. My brain was constantly working on two problems at once — what to say and how to perform. The performance suffered because my attention was divided. And the “spontaneous” moments were not really spontaneous at all. They were the result of a stressed brain grabbing at whatever was nearby, which is why I kept defaulting to the same filler phrases, the same weak transitions, the same comfortable tangents.
With a script, I have a home base. I know the words. I know the structure. I know exactly where I am going. Which means I can afford to depart from the plan when something interesting happens in the room. A comment from an audience member. An unexpected reaction. A moment that calls for a different approach. I can respond to all of it because I have a safe place to return to.
Ken Weber puts it directly: write it down. The act of writing forces you to examine every word, to think slowly and deliberately about what you are saying and why. And the finished script becomes your safety net — the thing that catches you when you wander and guides you back to the path.
Eugene Burger, one of the great philosophical voices in magic, said something that McCabe quotes and that I have taped to the inside of my prop case: “By having a script I have the freedom to depart from it.” That sentence contains the entire paradox of scripting in eleven words. The script does not constrain you. It liberates you. Because you cannot meaningfully depart from a plan you never had.
What I Wish I Had Known Earlier
If I could go back and talk to the version of myself who was resisting scripting, I would say three things.
One: the performers you admire who seem spontaneous are scripted. Every single one. The effortlessness you are mistaking for improvisation is the result of meticulous preparation rehearsed until it sounds natural.
Two: your audience deserves your best words, not your first words. When you wing it, you give them whatever your brain produces under pressure. When you script, you give them your best thinking, refined and sharpened over time.
Three: writing a script is not the end of the creative process. It is the beginning. You perform it, adjust it, find the lines that land and the ones that do not, and refine. The script evolves with every performance.
The Start of Something
That first scripted routine in Graz was the beginning of a complete transformation in how I approach performance. It was not the last script I would write — it was the first of many. And the process of writing scripts led me into territory I had never expected: thinking about every word I say as a deliberate choice, thinking about the function of each sentence, thinking about the relationship between my words and my actions.
This is where we are heading in this series of posts. We are entering the craft of performance — the part of this journey where the focus shifts from what you do to how you present what you do. Scripting is where it starts, because your words are the first and most direct tool you have for shaping an audience’s experience.
If you have never written a script for your performance — if you are where I was, believing you already know what to say — I have one suggestion. Record yourself. Watch the video. Then sit down with a blank page and write what you actually said, word for word.
If you can read it back without wincing, you are a better performer than I was.
And if you wince — welcome to the beginning.