I used to think writers were people who sat at desks. People who wrestled with blank pages, agonized over word choice, rearranged sentences until they clicked into place. Writers were novelists, journalists, screenwriters. They were not guys who stood in front of corporate audiences in Vienna shuffling cards and talking about the power of perception.
I was wrong about that. Spectacularly wrong.
The realization hit me during a period when I was performing a mentalism piece at corporate keynotes — something I had built into my speaking engagements as part of demonstrating how assumptions shape decision-making. The piece involved a prediction, a volunteer’s free choice, and a reveal. It worked. Audiences responded. But every time I performed it, the words came out slightly different. Not wildly different. The structure was the same, the beats were the same. But the specific phrases shifted from show to show, like sand rearranging itself on a beach.
Sometimes the shifts were improvements. A funnier line would surface spontaneously, or a cleaner way to frame the instructions would appear. But sometimes the shifts were damaging. I would add unnecessary qualifiers. I would over-explain. I would use a word that was technically accurate but emotionally flat. And I had no way of knowing which performances were better and which were worse because I had no baseline to compare against.
I had no baseline because I had no script.
Or more precisely, I did not think I had a script. In reality, I had one. Everyone who speaks during a performance has one. Mine just happened to be invisible, unexamined, and entirely accidental.
The Word That Changed Everything
When I picked up Pete McCabe’s Scripting Magic, the very first thing that stopped me was a distinction so simple that I almost missed its significance. McCabe insists on calling what a performer says a “script,” not “patter.” That might sound like a trivial semantic preference, and I nearly treated it as one. But the more I sat with it, the more I understood why he was so insistent.
“Patter” is a word that diminishes what it describes. It suggests something casual, disposable, secondary to the real work of the performance. Patter is what a carnival barker does. Patter is the verbal wallpaper you hang up while the real action happens with your hands. When you call your words “patter,” you are telling yourself — at a deep, structural level — that what you say does not really matter. That the words are filler between the moments of magic.
“Script” carries a completely different weight. A script is deliberate. A script is crafted. A script is the product of thought, revision, and intention. When a film director talks about the script, no one thinks they are referring to throwaway words. The script is the backbone. It is what holds everything together.
That single word swap — from patter to script — restructured how I thought about every sentence I said on stage.
The Accidental Script Audit
Once I accepted that I already had a script, even if I had never written it down, the next logical step was to figure out what that script actually was. So I did something that felt slightly absurd at the time: I performed one of my routines in a hotel room in Graz, recorded it on my phone, and then sat down with a notepad and transcribed every word.
Every word. Including the ums. Including the throat-clearing. Including the places where I repeated myself without realizing it.
The transcription ran to about three and a half handwritten pages. Reading it back was not a pleasant experience. It was like listening to a recording of your own voice for the first time — that queasy disconnect between how you think you sound and how you actually sound. Except this was about meaning, not sound. The disconnect was between what I thought I was communicating and what I was actually saying.
Here are some of the things I found in that transcription.
I used the phrase “what I’m going to do” four times in a seven-minute routine. Four times. Once would have been too many — the audience does not need a preview, they need an experience. But four times meant I was narrating my own procedure instead of performing.
I said “basically” three times. Basically is a word that communicates nothing. It is verbal static. It exists only to give the speaker a running start toward whatever they actually want to say, like a sprinter bouncing on their toes before the gun goes off. Except the audience is not waiting for the gun. They are already listening. The bouncing is just delay.
I discovered that I had a habit of trailing off at the end of sentences. Not with silence — silence can be powerful. I trailed off with a kind of verbal dissolve, where the last few words of a sentence would lose energy and volume, as if I was not quite committed to finishing the thought. On paper, those half-finished sentences looked terrible. In performance, they probably sounded worse.
And I found a moment — a crucial moment, right before the climax of the piece — where I said something genuinely good. A line that was clean and specific and landed exactly the way it should. But I almost did not notice it because it was buried in a swamp of less intentional language.
That line was the proof. It showed me what was possible when the words were right. And it showed me, by contrast, how much of the rest was not right. Not terrible. Just accidental. Unexamined. Unconscious.
The Consultant Meets the Writer
Here is the thing that made this click for me in a way it might not for everyone: I am a strategy consultant. My professional life is built on the precision of language. When I write a strategic recommendation for a client, I do not wing it. I do not use whatever words happen to tumble out of my mouth. I choose each phrase carefully because I know that the wrong word in a strategy document can send an entire organization in the wrong direction.
A recommendation to “consider expanding into the Austrian market” carries a fundamentally different weight than a recommendation to “aggressively pursue Austrian market dominance.” Same general idea. Wildly different implications. In consulting, everyone understands this. Nobody argues that the specific words do not matter.
And yet when I stood on stage to perform, I abandoned everything I knew about the power of deliberate language. I just… talked. I said whatever felt right in the moment. Sometimes it was good. Sometimes it was muddy. I had no way of knowing which was which because I had never examined the words as words.
The irony was almost comical. In my day job, I was obsessive about language. In my performance life, I was completely careless about it. Once I saw the contradiction, I could not unsee it.
Why Most Performers Resist This
There is a resistance among performers — and I felt it myself — to the idea of scripting. It sounds constraining. It sounds like it will make you stiff, robotic, inauthentic. The fear is that if you commit specific words to paper, you will lose the spontaneity that makes live performance feel alive.
This fear is understandable. It is also wrong.
Think about any comedian you admire. Every word of their set is scripted. Every pause is placed. Every apparent improvisation has been tested dozens of times until it sounds effortless. The spontaneity is not the absence of a script — it is the mastery of one. The script is what creates the platform from which genuine spontaneity can launch.
When you do not have a script, you are not free. You are lost. You are spending mental energy on basic word selection — energy that should be going to reading the audience, adjusting your timing, being present. The script handles the words so that your brain can handle everything else.
I think about it in consulting terms: you do not improvise a client presentation by walking in with no slides and no preparation and hoping good ideas show up. You prepare meticulously, and then the preparation gives you the confidence and the cognitive space to respond to questions, read the room, and adapt on the fly. The preparation enables the improvisation. Without it, you are just winging it and hoping for the best.
The Shift to Conscious Language
The period after that hotel room transcription in Graz became one of the most productive stretches of my development as a performer. Not because I learned new effects or practiced new techniques. Because I started paying attention to words.
I went through every routine I performed regularly and wrote the words down. Not what I wanted to say or planned to say, but what I actually said, captured from recordings of real performances. Then I read those transcriptions with a consultant’s eye, looking for waste. Looking for vagueness. Looking for moments where the words were working against the effect instead of for it.
The changes were often small. Replacing “I’m going to ask you to think of something” with “Think of something” — cutting five unnecessary words and replacing a passive, tentative request with a direct, confident one. Replacing “what’s interesting about this is” with just… stating the interesting thing. The audience does not need a label telling them something is interesting. If it is interesting, they will find it interesting. If it is not, no label will save it.
But some changes were large. I discovered entire sections of routines where I was filling time with words that served no purpose — verbal padding that existed because I was uncomfortable with silence, or because I had not thought through the transition, or because I was unconsciously stalling while my hands did something that needed concentration.
Those sections got rewritten or eliminated entirely. And the routines got shorter, tighter, and more effective. Not because I cut the good stuff. Because I cut the stuff that was never good to begin with — I just had not noticed because I had never looked.
You Are Already Writing
Here is what I want to leave you with, because this is the opening post in a series about language in performance, and I think the foundation matters more than any individual technique.
You are a writer. Right now. Today. Whether your performance is a five-minute close-up set at a dinner party or a ninety-minute keynote with theatrical effects, the words you say are your script. The only question is whether that script is intentional or accidental.
An accidental script can still be good, the way an accidental photograph can sometimes be beautiful. But you cannot replicate it. You cannot improve it systematically. You cannot identify what is working and protect it, or identify what is failing and fix it. You are at the mercy of whatever your brain happens to generate in the moment, and your brain — under the pressure of performance, with adrenaline flowing and an audience watching — is not always your most eloquent collaborator.
A deliberate script does not make you a robot. It makes you an architect. It means you have examined every load-bearing wall and every decorative flourish and made a conscious decision about each one. It means that when you deviate — and you will deviate, because live performance always involves deviation — you know what you are deviating from and can find your way back.
The posts that follow in this series are going to get specific. We are going to talk about words to eliminate, phrases that signal amateur status, verbal habits that undermine your authority, and the subtle ways that language can either elevate or deflate the magic you have worked so hard to create.
But none of that matters if you have not first accepted the premise: the words are the performance. Not a decoration on top of it. Not background noise while the real magic happens. The words are load-bearing. They are structural. They matter as much as anything your hands do.
You are a writer. The only question is whether you are going to be a good one.