For the first year and a half that I performed, I worked from bullet points. An outline, basically. A list of key beats I wanted to hit, in order, with enough space between them for me to fill in the words on the fly.
I told myself this was the professional approach. Bullet points give you flexibility. They let you respond to the room. They keep you from sounding canned. Every argument I made in favor of bullet points was, I now realize, an argument against doing the hard work of actually memorizing a full script.
The truth is, I was afraid. Afraid that memorizing every word would turn me into a robot. Afraid I would sound like I was reading from a teleprompter. Afraid that the precision of a memorized script would squeeze the life out of my delivery.
I was wrong about all of it.
The Night the Bullet Points Failed
The turning point came at a tech conference in Vienna. Mid-sized audience, maybe a hundred and fifty people, good energy in the room. I was performing a mentalism piece that required careful patter — the kind of piece where what you say matters almost as much as what you do, because the words are building a frame around the effect.
I hit my first bullet point: establish the premise. Fine. I hit the second: engage a volunteer. Fine. Then I hit a stretch where the bullet points said something like “build suspense, transition to reveal.” And in the moment, standing on that stage, I had no idea what words to use.
Not a blank. Not a freeze. Nothing that dramatic. I just found myself reaching for language that was not there. I started a sentence, decided it was the wrong sentence, pivoted to another one, felt that one trailing off, tried a third approach. The whole thing probably took eight seconds. To the audience, it might have looked like a thoughtful pause. To me, it felt like falling.
What I realized afterward, sitting alone in the hotel bar with a glass of wine and a sinking feeling, was that my bullet-point system had a fatal flaw. It gave me the what but not the how. It told me where to go but not how to get there. And in the gap between knowing my destination and knowing my route, I was forced to improvise language in real time while simultaneously managing the physical actions of the performance, reading the audience, maintaining my character, and tracking the technical requirements of the effect.
That is too many things to think about at once. Something has to give. And what gave, that night in Vienna, was the quality of my language. My words got muddy. My sentences got tangled. My delivery lost its rhythm. Not catastrophically — the audience still responded well to the effect itself. But I could feel the difference between the sections where I knew exactly what I was going to say and the sections where I was building the plane while flying it.
The Safe House
When I went back to studying Ken Weber’s Maximum Entertainment after that experience, a concept I had previously skimmed past suddenly had weight. Weber describes the memorized script as your “safe house” — the Saint Bernard ready to pull you back to safety when you have wandered too far into improvised territory.
The metaphor clicked for me in a way it had not before. A safe house is not a prison. You do not have to stay there. You can leave any time you want — wander off, explore, follow an interesting moment wherever it leads. But you always know how to get back. The route home is memorized, locked in, automatic. You do not have to think about it. And because you do not have to think about it, you are free to think about everything else.
Pete McCabe makes a similar point about scripting enabling spontaneity. The script is not the enemy of being present. The script is what makes being present possible. When the words are handled — when they are stored in muscle memory so deep that they come out the way breathing comes out — your conscious mind is liberated to do the things that actually make a performance great: connecting with the audience, adjusting your timing, riding the energy of the room.
This is the paradox that changed my act. Memorization does not make you robotic. Memorization makes you free.
The Experiment
After that Vienna performance, I decided to test the principle properly. I took one piece from my set — a card effect I performed regularly — and I scripted every single word. Not just the key beats. Every transition. Every pause. Every aside. Every comment I might make to a volunteer. Every recovery line if something did not land.
I wrote it out longhand first. Then I typed it up. Then I recorded myself speaking it. Then I listened to the recording and revised the parts that sounded stiff. Then I recorded it again. Then I memorized the whole thing — not by rote repetition, but by performing it over and over in my hotel room in Linz until the words stopped being words I was remembering and started being words I was thinking.
That distinction matters. There is a stage of memorization where you are recalling. You are pulling words from storage, one at a time, like reaching into a filing cabinet. That stage sounds memorized. It sounds canned. It sounds like exactly what I had been afraid of.
But if you push past that stage — if you keep rehearsing until the words are no longer being retrieved but are simply arising — something shifts. The words become yours. They feel like thoughts you are having for the first time. They come with the natural rhythm and emphasis of actual speech because they have been shaped and reshaped until they fit the contours of how you actually think.
I performed the fully scripted version of that card effect at a private event in Klagenfurt, and the difference was immediate. Not in the audience’s reaction to the effect itself — that was about the same. The difference was in me. I was not thinking about language. I was not searching for words. I was not dividing my attention between what to say and how to say it. I was just… there. Present. In the room. Watching the volunteer’s face. Feeling the energy shift when the moment of impossibility landed. Adjusting my pacing in real time because I had the bandwidth to notice that the room needed a slightly longer pause right here, a slightly quicker delivery right there.
It was the most natural I had ever felt on stage. And it was the most scripted I had ever been.
The Cognitive Science Behind It
The explanation is cognitive load. Your working memory — the part of your brain that handles real-time processing — has a limited capacity. If you are using that capacity to generate language, you have less available for everything else: reading the room, managing your physical actions, maintaining your character, responding to unexpected moments.
Memorizing your script offloads language generation from working memory to long-term memory. This frees up your conscious mind for the things that actually require real-time processing: the audience, the moment, the performance.
Think of it like driving. When you first learned, every action required conscious attention. Steering, braking, checking mirrors — all of it consumed your working memory. But once those actions became automatic, driving became the backdrop against which everything else happened. You could talk, think, plan, observe — because the mechanics no longer required your conscious attention.
That is what memorization does for your script. It turns the words into driving. Automatic. Reliable. Freeing you to do the work that only a present, attentive human being can do.
What Memorization Actually Looks Like
I want to be specific about this because I think people picture the wrong thing when they hear “memorize your script.”
They picture sitting at a desk, reading lines over and over, like cramming for an exam. That is the least effective approach.
What works for me is performance repetition. I stand up in my hotel room and perform the piece. Full commitment. Full vocal delivery. I say the words while doing the actions, with the same energy I would bring to a real audience. Then I do it again. And again.
The first ten times, I am remembering. The words are in my head as text, and I am converting text to speech. This is the robotic phase. This is the phase that feels artificial and stilted and confirming of every fear about memorization.
The next ten times, I am recalling. The words are coming more quickly, but they are still being pulled from storage. There is a slight delay — a microsecond of retrieval — that creates a quality of speaking that is subtly different from natural speech.
Somewhere around the twentieth or twenty-fifth time, something shifts. The words start arriving before I reach for them. They are not being recalled. They are just there, the way my next breath is there. I am not thinking about the words any more than I am thinking about the grammar of my sentences or the position of my tongue. The language has become transparent.
That is when the script becomes a safe house. That is when memorization enables spontaneity. Because I can now walk away from the script — follow a moment, respond to a volunteer, ride a laugh — and walk back without thinking about it. The script is there the way the road is there when you are driving. You do not have to look for it. You do not have to think about where it goes. You just get back on it.
The Freedom on the Other Side
The irony of this whole process is that once I fully memorized my scripts, I started improvising more than I ever had before. Not because I was abandoning the script, but because the script gave me a stable platform from which to launch.
I could throw in a comment about the venue because I was not worried about losing my place. I could spend an extra thirty seconds with a volunteer because I knew exactly where to pick up the thread. I could adjust my energy mid-sentence because I was not using energy to find the next word.
The best performers I have ever watched all share this quality. They seem loose, relaxed, spontaneous. And they are — on the surface. But underneath, there is a structure holding everything in place. A memorized script. A safe house. A Saint Bernard waiting in the wings.
If you are performing from bullet points — if you are winging the connective tissue between your key beats — I am not going to tell you it cannot work. It can. I did it for a year and a half, and nobody complained.
But once you experience the freedom that comes from knowing every word, you will never go back to bullet points. Not because bullet points are bad, but because the alternative is so much better. The paradox is real. The more precisely you know your words, the more naturally you speak them. The more thoroughly you prepare, the more spontaneous you appear. The tighter the structure, the greater the freedom.
I learned this in a hotel room in Linz, standing in front of a mirror, saying the same sentences for the twenty-fifth time, and suddenly realizing I was not saying them anymore.
I was just talking.