The opening line for the best piece in my current show did not come to me at a desk. It did not come during a rehearsal. It did not come while I was working on the piece at all.
It came in the shower at a hotel in Salzburg, three days after I had stopped working on the script, while I was thinking about absolutely nothing related to magic.
I had been struggling with the opening for almost two weeks. I had written at least a dozen versions. Some were too clever. Some were too long. Some started strong but painted me into a corner for the rest of the piece. None of them felt right — that particular “right” that you can feel in your chest when a line clicks into place, when you hear it and know that this is the one, this is how it starts.
I had been pushing harder and harder, spending more time at the desk, more time staring at the screen, more time rearranging words. And the harder I pushed, the further the right line retreated.
Then I gave up. Not permanently — I had a performance deadline. But I put the script in a drawer, metaphorically speaking, and stopped thinking about it. I traveled to Salzburg for a consulting engagement. I spent two days in meetings. I went to dinner with colleagues. I slept. I showered.
And in the shower, without effort, without invitation, the line appeared. Fully formed. Like someone had slipped it under the door of my consciousness while I was looking elsewhere.
I stood there with shampoo running into my eyes, repeating the line to myself, terrified I would forget it before I could write it down. I did not forget it. It was too good to forget. It was the kind of line that feels inevitable once you hear it, as if it had always existed and you were simply the first person to notice it.
What Weber Calls Marination
I wrote about this principle briefly in an earlier post — the three-day rule for editing scripts. But the more I have worked with this phenomenon, the more I have come to believe it deserves deeper exploration, because it is not just a revision technique. It is a creative methodology.
Ken Weber writes in Maximum Entertainment about letting scripts marinate. “Time allows your thoughts to marinate,” he says. “Your subconscious dices and chops and invents variations.” When I first encountered that line, I treated it as poetic encouragement. Step away, come back fresh, you will see things differently. Good advice, but not exactly revolutionary.
What I did not understand then, and what I have come to understand through repeated experience, is that Weber is describing something more precise than “take a break.” He is describing a cognitive process that operates independently of conscious effort — a process that is, in many ways, more powerful than anything your conscious mind can produce.
The Science of Incubation
There is a well-documented phenomenon in cognitive psychology called the incubation effect. The basic finding is this: when you work on a problem, reach an impasse, and then step away to do something unrelated, you are often more likely to find a solution than if you had continued working on the problem without interruption.
The classic research involves insight puzzles — problems that require a sudden reframing rather than incremental progress. Participants who took a break after working on these puzzles and returned later outperformed participants who worked continuously. The break itself seemed to contribute to the solution.
Several theories explain why this happens. One is that conscious focus creates fixation. When you are actively working on a problem, your thinking follows established grooves — the same approaches, the same angles. You get stuck in a loop. Stepping away breaks the loop.
Another theory is that the subconscious continues to process the problem during the break. Even though you are not consciously thinking about the script, your brain has not abandoned it. It is running low-level processes in the background — making connections, testing alternatives, filtering possibilities. When one produces something promising, it gets pushed into conscious awareness. That is the shower moment.
A third theory — the one I find most compelling — is that the break changes the criteria your brain uses for evaluation. When you are actively working, your conscious mind applies strict, narrow criteria. During the break, the subconscious applies broader, more associative criteria. It connects the script problem to unrelated experiences, memories, phrases from conversation, rhythms from music, tonal patterns from a film. These connections produce ideas that the conscious mind would never generate.
My Own Evidence
I have been keeping an informal log of my best script revisions for about two years now. Not a formal study — just notes in the margin of my scripting notebook about where and when good ideas arrived.
The pattern is overwhelming. The majority of my best lines, my best structural ideas, and my best solutions to scripting problems arrived during periods of non-work. In the shower. On a train between Vienna and Graz. During a run. In the half-awake state just before falling asleep or just after waking up.
Almost none of them arrived during dedicated writing sessions. The writing sessions produced solid, workmanlike material — competent lines, functional transitions, adequate setups. But the lines that made me sit up and say “yes, that is it” — those came from the margins of my day, from the spaces between effort.
This does not mean the writing sessions are wasted. They are essential. They are where I do the conscious work that feeds the subconscious process. You cannot marinate something that has not been prepared first. The writing session is the preparation — the laying out of ingredients, the defining of the problem, the exploration of the territory. The marination is what happens after, when the conscious mind steps back and lets the deeper processes do their work.
The Breakthrough on the Train
One of the most dramatic examples happened last year. I was working on a mentalism piece for a keynote in Innsbruck — a piece where I needed a specific kind of transition between the setup and the reveal. The transition needed to do three things simultaneously: shift the audience’s attention, create a moment of humor, and set up the emotional tone for the climax. I had been writing and rewriting this transition for four days. I had a version that did two of the three things but not the third. I had another version that did all three but was too long. I had a third version that was the right length but the humor felt forced.
I was stuck. Genuinely stuck. I could feel myself starting to overwork the material, making it worse instead of better, adding complexity where I needed simplicity.
So I closed the laptop. I packed for the trip. I took the train from Vienna to Innsbruck, which is about four and a half hours. I did not bring the script. I deliberately left it behind. I read a novel on the train. I looked out the window at the mountains.
Somewhere around Bischofshofen, about two hours in, the transition appeared. Not a piece of it. The whole thing. Three sentences. One action. One pause. It did all three things — attention shift, humor, emotional setup — in about fifteen seconds of performance time. It was elegant in the way that only simple things can be.
I grabbed my phone and typed it into a notes app before it could dissolve. Then I read it back and laughed, because it was so obviously the right answer that I could not believe I had spent four days looking for it.
But here is the thing: I would not have found it without those four days. The four days of conscious work were not wasted effort. They were the process of defining the problem with enough precision that my subconscious could solve it. The marination only works if the preparation is thorough. You cannot step away from a problem you have not properly engaged with.
How I Build Marination into My Process
I have changed my scripting workflow based on this understanding. Instead of writing a script in one continuous session and then editing it, I now write in deliberate phases with built-in gaps.
Phase one is the dump. I write everything that comes to mind, without editing. This is pure conscious work — getting the raw material onto the page. It is messy and overwritten. That is fine. The dump is not the script. It is the ingredient list.
Phase two is the gap. I leave it alone. Minimum one full day, ideally three. I keep a notepad accessible — by the bed, in my bag — because ideas will arrive uninvited and I want to catch them.
Phase three is the return. I read the dump with fresh eyes, bringing any notes from the gap period — the shower ideas, the train ideas, the half-awake ideas. This is where the real script emerges.
Phase four is the second gap. After the initial revision, I step away again. This time the subconscious is working on more refined material, finding smaller adjustments, polishing phrases.
Phase five is the final revision. By this point, the material has been through two cycles of conscious work and two cycles of subconscious processing, and it is invariably better than anything I could have produced in a single sustained effort.
The Parallel Everyone Recognizes
Here is a fact that most people accept without question: breakthrough ideas often come in the shower. In the car. On a walk. During exercise. In the moments between waking and sleeping. Everyone has experienced this. Everyone knows that sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to stop trying to solve it.
And yet, when it comes to creative work, most of us default to the brute-force approach. Sit at the desk. Keep writing. Push harder. Spend more time. The assumption is that more effort equals more output, that the person who works longer produces better results.
For mechanical tasks, this is true. For creative tasks, it is often the opposite. Creative problems — and scripting is fundamentally a creative problem — respond better to cycles of engagement and disengagement than to sustained pressure.
The marinating effect is not laziness disguised as a method. It is a genuine cognitive phenomenon that produces results you cannot achieve through conscious effort alone. It is not a replacement for hard work. It is a complement to it — the other half of the creative equation that most people ignore because it does not feel like work.
The Notebook by the Bed
I keep a notebook and pen on my nightstand now. Not a phone — a physical notebook, because the light from a phone screen kills the half-awake state where the best ideas live.
In the last year, I have filled most of that notebook with lines, phrases, structural ideas, and solutions to scripting problems. Some of them are illegible because I wrote them in the dark. Some of them are fragments that do not make sense in the morning. But some of them are the best material I have ever written.
The subconscious does not keep business hours. It works on its own schedule, delivers on its own timeline, and communicates through channels that conscious effort cannot access. Your job is not to direct it. Your job is to feed it good problems, give it time, and be ready with a pen when it decides to share what it has found.
Let the script marinate. Do the work, then step away. Trust that the quiet part of your mind is more creative than you are.
It has never let me down.