My first few scripts were half-scripts. I did not know that at the time. I thought they were complete. They contained every word I intended to say, carefully written, edited for the Big Three reactions, tightened and polished. I was proud of them.
What they did not contain was a single reference to what my body was doing while I said those words.
I discovered this gap during a performance in Vienna, at a private function for a financial services company. The show was going well. My words were landing. The audience was engaged. And then I reached a transition between effects where I needed to set down one prop and pick up another, and my brain went blank.
Not about what to say. I knew what to say. The script was right there in my mind, every word ready to go. But my hands did not know what to do. I was holding a prop in my right hand that needed to go somewhere, I needed to pick up something else that was on my table to the left, and I had not planned the choreography of that exchange. So I fumbled. I did an awkward little shuffle where I turned my back to the audience for a moment, put the prop down in the wrong spot, reached across my body to grab the next item, and ended up facing the wrong direction to deliver my opening line for the next routine.
Three seconds of awkwardness. Maybe four. In the moment, it felt like thirty.
The audience probably did not notice. Or if they noticed, they forgot it immediately once the next effect got underway. But I noticed. And I noticed because it was not the first time it had happened. It was just the first time I paid attention to why.
The reason was simple: my scripts were dialogue-only. They were movie scripts missing the stage directions.
The Missing Half
Ken Weber is adamant about this in Maximum Entertainment: a performance script must include both dialogue and actions. Not just what you say, but what you do. Which hand holds the prop. Where the volunteer stands. When you move to the table. How you transition between effects. Every physical movement the audience sees needs to be written down with the same care you give to your words.
When I first read this, I resisted it for the same reasons I initially resisted scripting at all. It seemed like overkill. It seemed mechanical. It seemed like the kind of obsessive detail that would make me a rigid, robotic performer rather than a fluid, natural one.
But I had learned my lesson about that kind of resistance. The last time I thought scripting was unnecessary, I discovered I was rambling. So this time, instead of dismissing the advice, I tried it.
I sat down with the script for the routine that had given me trouble in Vienna. And underneath each line of dialogue, I started writing what I was doing. Where my hands were. What I was holding. Where I was standing on stage. Where I was looking.
The result was alarming. Not because the writing was hard — it was straightforward, just descriptive — but because the process immediately exposed a dozen moments in my routine where I had no idea what my body was supposed to be doing.
The Dead Time Discovery
There is a concept in performance that I had read about but never truly understood until I started writing action scripts: dead time. Dead time is any moment during a performance where nothing is happening for the audience. The performer is doing something — reaching for a prop, adjusting their position, looking at their table — but the audience is not being engaged. They are waiting.
Dead time is the enemy of entertainment, and it hides in the physical gaps between scripted words.
When my script was dialogue-only, I had unconsciously papered over these gaps. My words were continuous, so from a dialogue perspective, there was no dead time. But physically? Physically, there were moments in every routine where I was busy doing things that the audience could not see or had no reason to watch, and those moments created dead spots in the experience.
Here is the insidious thing about dead time: it is invisible to the performer. You are busy. From your perspective, every second is full. But from the audience’s perspective, you just stopped being interesting for three or four seconds while you shuffled something around on your table. And three seconds of dead time is enough for someone to check their phone, for attention to wander, for the spell to break.
Writing down my actions exposed every one of these dead spots. Because when I wrote “Pick up envelope from table” as a standalone action with no accompanying dialogue or audience engagement, it sat there on the page, naked and obvious: this is a moment where the audience has nothing.
The Integration
Once I could see the dead spots, I could fix them. And fixing them meant integrating words and actions so that the audience always had something to engage with.
Some fixes were simple. I moved dialogue to cover physical transitions. Instead of finishing a sentence, then silently picking up a prop, then starting the next sentence, I restructured the timing so that the pickup happened during the sentence. The words bridged the physical gap, and the audience never experienced a moment of nothing.
Other fixes required rethinking the choreography entirely. I had a moment in one routine where I walked to my table, picked up two items, walked back to center stage, and then began speaking. Five seconds of dead time, minimum. By scripting the actions, I realized I could have one of the items pre-positioned closer. I could talk while walking. I could use the walk itself as a beat in the narrative rather than a logistical necessity.
The principle became clear: words and actions should overlap. When the audience is watching your hands do something interesting, your words should enhance that visual. When you are saying something compelling, your physical position should reinforce the moment. The two tracks — verbal and physical — should be woven together so tightly that the audience never has to choose between watching and listening.
What an Action Script Looks Like
Let me describe the format I settled on, because it took me a few attempts to find one that worked.
I use a two-column approach. The left column is dialogue — what I say. The right column is actions — what I do. Each row represents a beat in the routine, and the columns are synchronized so I can see exactly what is happening verbally and physically at any given moment.
For the actions column, I write in the present tense and I am specific. Not “pick up cards” but “left hand picks up deck from table, thumb on top, fingers below.” Not “hand prop to volunteer” but “extend right hand toward volunteer, prop resting on open palm, make eye contact while handing over.” Not “move to the right” but “two steps stage right, turn to face audience at forty-five degrees.”
This level of detail felt absurd the first time I did it. I was describing to myself how to hand someone a pen. But the absurdity faded quickly, because I discovered that the specificity solved problems I did not know I had.
When I wrote “left hand picks up deck,” I was forced to confront the question: why the left hand? Is something in my right hand? Should something be in my right hand? What does the audience see when I reach with my left — does it create a clean visual, or does it look awkward? Does using the left hand for the pickup mean I will need to transfer the deck later, creating another moment of hand-to-hand choreography?
These questions sound trivial. They are not. Every physical choice creates downstream consequences. Every hand that holds a prop is a hand that cannot gesture. Every position on stage determines your angle to the audience. Every pickup and putdown is either smooth or fumbled, and the difference between the two is whether you planned it in advance or made it up in the moment.
The Consultant’s Parallel
In strategy consulting, there is a principle I have used with clients for years: if you cannot draw it, you do not understand it. Action scripting is the performance equivalent. If you cannot write down what your body does during a routine, you do not actually know what your body does. You have a general sense. But vague specifics produce vague performances.
Writing it down forces decisions. Which hand picks up the prop. Where you stand. How the transition works. And those decisions, once made and rehearsed, become automatic. They free your brain from solving physical logistics in real time, which frees your attention for the audience.
The script does not constrain you. It liberates you. Once you know where your hands go, you stop thinking about where your hands go. That freed-up cognitive space is the difference between a performer managing logistics and a performer connecting with people.
The Rehearsal Shift
Writing action scripts changed how I rehearse. Before, rehearsal meant running through the routine while performing physical actions. It felt productive. But I was reinforcing vagueness. Every time I rehearsed, my hands did things slightly differently — picked up the prop from a slightly different angle, stood in a slightly different spot.
This variation is not spontaneity. It is imprecision. And imprecision accumulates. The routine that felt smooth on Tuesday feels awkward on Thursday because your hands went somewhere unexpected.
With an action script, rehearsal has a reference standard. You know exactly what the routine should look like physically. Deviations are errors to be corrected. This sounds rigid, but it produces consistency. And consistency produces the relaxed, natural-looking performance that audiences actually want to see.
The Fumbling Elimination
Within two weeks of adopting action scripts, my fumbling dropped to nearly zero. This was the most immediate, tangible benefit. Props ended up where they were supposed to be. Transitions between effects were smooth. I never found myself holding something in the wrong hand or standing in the wrong spot or reaching awkwardly across my body for something that should have been positioned differently.
The reason was simple: every physical moment had been planned. Not in a general, “I’ll figure it out” way, but in a specific, “left hand places the envelope on the right side of the table while I take two steps toward the volunteer” way. The specificity eliminated the decision-making that had been causing the fumbling. My body knew what to do because I had told it what to do, on paper, before I ever stood up to rehearse.
At a conference in Innsbruck a month later, I performed a routine that involved multiple props, a volunteer, and three distinct phases. It was the most physically complex piece in my set. And for the first time ever, every transition was seamless. Every prop ended up in the right place at the right time. Every movement was clean and purposeful.
After the show, a colleague from the conference told me I looked “effortless.” That word — effortless — is the payoff of action scripting. The effort is invisible precisely because it happened on paper, weeks before the performance. What the audience sees is not effort. It is the result of effort. And the result looks like ease.
The Complete Script
I no longer write dialogue-only scripts. Every script I create has both columns — what I say and what I do, synchronized beat by beat, covering every moment from the first word to the last.
This takes longer. Adding the action column doubles the writing time, because you are making dozens of physical decisions you previously left to chance. But the investment pays for itself in rehearsal. You are building muscle memory for specific physical sequences, not general tendencies. And when you finally perform, the routine runs like a machine — warm, human, and responsive, because all the mechanical decisions have been made and all your attention is free for the human work.
Your script is not just words. It is everything the audience sees and hears. If you are only scripting half of that equation, you are performing with half a map.
Write it all down. The words and the actions.