I used to be terrified of silence.
Not the silence of an empty room or a quiet evening. The silence of standing on stage in front of people and not saying anything. That silence. The silence that feels like a void opening beneath your feet, a gap in the performance that the audience will notice and judge and interpret as a mistake.
So I filled it. I filled every second of every performance with words. If there was a gap — a natural pause between thoughts, a moment of transition, a beat where the audience needed time to process what had just happened — I covered it with speech. I talked over the silence the way you might paper over a crack in a wall. The crack was still there, but at least no one could see it.
This approach had one advantage: I never had an awkward silence on stage. And it had one catastrophic disadvantage: I never had an effective silence on stage either. I never gave the audience room to breathe. I never let a moment land. I never allowed the space that separates a good performance from a great one.
It took Pete McCabe’s Scripting Magic to break me of the habit. McCabe writes about silence in a way that reframed everything for me. He talks about how most performers jabber — they are afraid of silence and fill every gap with words. But silence, he argues, is where the magic lives. Not in the words, not in the actions, but in the spaces between them.
That idea — that the silence IS the performance — changed how I think about every second I spend on stage.
Why We Fear the Pause
The fear of silence on stage is almost universal, and it makes perfect sense when you think about what a pause feels like from the performer’s perspective.
When you pause, the spotlight is on you and you are doing nothing. No words are coming out. No actions are happening. You are just… there. Standing in front of people. Existing in their gaze without the protective shield of activity.
For someone who is not yet comfortable on stage — and I was very much not comfortable when I started — this feels like being naked. The words are your clothing. The activity is your armor. Take those away and you are exposed. Vulnerable. Visible in a way that makes your chest tighten and your instinct scream: say something, do something, fill this gap before they realize you have nothing.
But here is the thing. That is entirely the performer’s experience. From the audience’s perspective, the pause looks completely different.
From the audience’s perspective, a pause communicates confidence. It says: I am comfortable here. I am in no rush. I know exactly what I am doing, and the next thing I say will be worth the wait. A performer who can stand in silence and hold it — who does not flinch, does not fidget, does not break eye contact — projects a level of command that no amount of rapid-fire talking can match.
The audience does not experience a pause as a void. They experience it as a signal. Something important is about to happen. Or something important just happened. Either way, the pause tells them to pay attention.
The Eugene Burger Principle
McCabe references Eugene Burger’s approach to pauses, and it is worth dwelling on because Burger was one of the great masters of silence in magic performance.
Burger was known for long pauses between sentences. Not the brief, polite pauses of conversational speech. Long pauses. The kind that would feel uncomfortable in a normal conversation. The kind where you wonder if the speaker has forgotten what they were going to say.
But Burger had not forgotten anything. He was doing something much more deliberate. He was letting the silence do the work.
A sentence, followed by a long pause, followed by another sentence, creates a rhythm that is fundamentally different from continuous speech. Each sentence becomes an event. Each pause becomes a frame. The audience processes each idea fully before the next one arrives, which means each idea has maximum impact.
Compare this to the way most performers deliver their material: a rapid stream of sentences with barely a breath between them, each thought overlapping the last, the audience struggling to keep up and eventually giving up and passively receiving rather than actively engaging.
Burger’s pauses forced active engagement. They made each sentence a standalone moment that demanded attention. And the silence between sentences was not empty — it was full of the audience’s own thoughts, their own processing, their own emotional responses to what had just been said.
The Three Types of Pause
As I worked on integrating pauses into my own performance, I found it helpful to categorize them into three types, each serving a different function.
The first is the anticipation pause. This is the pause before something important happens. It is the silence before the reveal, the held breath before the impossible moment, the space between the buildup and the climax. The anticipation pause creates tension. It tells the audience that what comes next is significant enough to warrant a moment of preparation.
I use anticipation pauses before every major moment in my performance. Before a prediction is revealed. Before a chosen card is turned over. Before the climax of a mentalism piece. The pause does not need to be long — two or three seconds can be enough. But it needs to be there. Without it, the revelation just arrives, unannounced and unframed. With it, the revelation is elevated into an event.
The second is the landing pause. This is the pause after something important has happened. It is the silence that follows the reveal, the beat after the impossible moment, the space in which the audience processes what they just witnessed. The landing pause says: that was significant enough to deserve a moment of contemplation.
The landing pause is the one I neglected most in my early performing. I would execute a reveal and immediately start talking — explaining, transitioning, moving to the next thing. I was so eager to keep the momentum going that I never let the moment land. The audience would react, and I would talk over their reaction, which had the dual effect of cutting short their emotional response and signaling that even I did not think the moment was important enough to dwell on.
Now I let landing pauses run. Sometimes for four or five seconds. Sometimes longer, if the reaction warrants it. The silence after a strong moment is not dead air. It is the audience experiencing the magic. Why would I interrupt that?
The third is the replacement pause. This is the pause that takes the place of a filler word. Instead of “um,” silence. Instead of “uh,” silence. Instead of “well,” or “so,” or “like” — silence.
This is the pause that took me the longest to master, because filler words are deeply embedded in how most of us speak. They are verbal tics, unconscious habits, the linguistic equivalent of fidgeting. We use them because our mouths want to be doing something while our brains are catching up. The pause feels like an absence. The filler word feels like a presence.
But the audience hears it differently. An “um” signals uncertainty. A pause signals deliberation. An “uh” signals that you have lost your place. A silence signals that you are choosing your next words carefully. The difference in how the audience perceives you is enormous, and all it requires is learning to be comfortable with the gap.
The Practice
Replacing filler words with silence is simple to describe and genuinely difficult to execute, because you are fighting a lifetime of conversational habit. Here is the practice that worked for me.
I recorded myself delivering a routine — one I knew well, one where the words were memorized and the structure was solid. Then I listened back with a pen and paper and counted every filler word. Every um, every uh, every “so,” every “right,” every “okay” that was not serving a genuine communicative purpose.
The first time I did this, I counted seventeen filler words in a four-minute routine. Seventeen moments where my mouth was producing sound that communicated nothing except nervousness.
Then I performed the routine again, with a single instruction to myself: whenever you feel a filler word forming, close your mouth and say nothing. Let the silence happen. Hold it for as long as the filler word would have lasted, and then continue.
The first few times, I could feel the discomfort physically. My jaw wanted to move. My tongue wanted to produce a sound. The silence felt wrong, like a missing heartbeat. But I held it, and when I listened back, the silence sounded like confidence. It sounded like a performer who was in no rush, who knew exactly where they were going, who was choosing each word with care.
Over weeks of practice — mostly in hotel rooms, mostly late at night, mostly talking to the bathroom mirror like the slightly unhinged person I was becoming — the replacement pauses started to feel natural. Not effortless, but natural. The filler words did not disappear entirely, but they reduced from seventeen per routine to two or three, and those remaining ones were mostly in transitions where they served a conversational function.
Silence as Confidence
Here is what I have learned about silence on stage: it is the single most reliable indicator of confidence that an audience can perceive.
A performer who fills every gap with sound is telling the audience, through their behavior if not their words: I am not comfortable in this silence. I need to keep producing sound to justify my presence here. I am afraid that if I stop talking, you will stop paying attention.
A performer who can hold silence — who can stand on stage, say nothing, and own that silence with their posture and their gaze — is telling the audience something entirely different: I belong here. I am in control. The next thing I say will be worth your patience.
This is why some of the most powerful moments in any performance — magic or otherwise — are moments of silence. The comedian who pauses before the punchline and lets the audience squirm with anticipation. The actor who holds a beat after a devastating line and lets the silence carry the emotion. The musician who rests for a bar and lets the absence of sound make the return of sound more powerful.
Silence is not the absence of performance. Silence is a performance choice. And it is the choice that separates performers who fill time from performers who own it.
The Courage of Silence
I call it courage because that is what it requires, especially in the beginning. The courage to stand in front of people and offer them nothing except your presence. The courage to trust that the silence will work, that the audience will not interpret it as failure, that the moment you are building will justify the wait.
Every time I hold a pause on stage — every time I resist the impulse to fill the gap with words — I am making a small act of trust. Trust in the material, trust in the audience, trust in myself.
And every time the pause works — every time I see the audience lean in during the silence, every time the reveal that follows lands harder because of the space that preceded it — that trust is reinforced.
Silence is not comfortable. It probably never will be entirely comfortable. But it is powerful. More powerful than any word I know, more powerful than any line I have ever written, more powerful than any vocal technique I have ever learned.
The pause is the performance. And learning to love it — or at least to stop fearing it — is one of the most important things I have done as a performer.