I stole an anecdote once. Not intentionally — at least, I did not think of it as stealing at the time. I was building a presentation for a piece I wanted to perform at a corporate event in Vienna, and I needed a story to set up the theme. Something personal. Something that would make the audience lean in before the magic began.
I did not have a good story of my own. Or rather, I thought I did not. So I borrowed one. I had heard another performer tell a story about a moment with his grandfather — a memory about watching something impossible and feeling, as a child, that the world was bigger than he had been told. It was a beautiful story. It moved people. And I thought: if I change the details, make it mine, adjust the setting, it will work.
I changed the grandfather to an uncle. I changed the setting from a stage show to a family dinner. I kept the emotional arc — the wonder, the realization, the lasting impact. I rehearsed it until it sounded natural. I performed it at the event.
And it bombed. Not visibly. The audience did not boo or walk out. The piece that followed worked fine. But the story itself — the stolen, adapted, dressed-up story — landed flat. Polite smiles. Some nods. But no lean-in. No emotional connection. No spark.
I knew why, even in the moment. I could feel it while I was telling it. The words were right but the feeling was wrong. I was narrating something that had not happened to me, and some part of my delivery — some micro-expression, some tonal shift, some imperceptible absence of genuine emotion — was telling the audience that the story was not mine.
The BS Detector
Scott Alexander puts this as directly as anyone can: “Ninety percent of being a successful entertainer is sincerity.” When I first read that line, I thought he was exaggerating for effect. Ninety percent? Surely technique matters more than sincerity. Surely the quality of the effect, the construction of the show, the years of practice — surely those count for more than whether your anecdotes are true.
But the more I performed, the more I came to understand what Alexander was really saying. He was not arguing that technique does not matter. He was arguing that without sincerity, technique is a machine running without fuel. You can have perfect mechanics and still leave the audience cold if they do not believe you mean what you are saying. And they can tell. They always can tell.
Pete McCabe, in his work on scripting, makes a related point about writing from the audience’s perspective. When you are crafting a script, every line needs to serve the audience’s experience, and that experience includes their constant, usually unconscious, evaluation of your honesty. If something feels scripted in the pejorative sense — too smooth, too calculated, too perfectly constructed — the audience’s radar pings. They may not identify what is wrong. They just feel less engaged. Less trusting. Less willing to go wherever you are trying to take them.
Why Fake Stories Fail
A fabricated personal story fails for reasons that are more scientific than mystical, though the effect can feel almost mystical in the moment.
First, there is the detail problem. When you tell a true story, you remember sensory details that you did not plan to include. The smell of the room. The color of someone’s shirt. The way the chair squeaked when you sat down. These details emerge naturally because they are encoded in your memory alongside the event itself. When you tell a fabricated story, the details are all invented, and invented details have a different quality. They are either too generic — “it was a nice restaurant” — or too perfect — “the candlelight flickered against the exposed brick wall.” Real memory is messy and specific in unpredictable ways. Fabricated memory is either bland or cinematic. Neither sounds like life.
Second, there is the emotion problem. When you recall something that actually happened to you, the emotion comes with the memory. You do not have to generate it. It is already there, attached to the experience, and it shows up in your voice, your face, your pacing — automatically, without effort. When you are performing a fabricated story, you have to manufacture the emotion, and manufactured emotion has a quality that audiences can detect. It arrives at the right moments — too precisely. It has the right intensity — too calibrated. It is the right kind of emotion for the story — too convenient. Real emotion is messier, less predictable, sometimes arriving at unexpected moments or in unexpected intensities. That unpredictability is what makes it feel real.
Third, there is the conviction problem. When you tell a true story, you tell it with the quiet authority of someone who was there. You do not need to sell it. You do not need to work for the audience’s belief. The story happened. You know it happened. And that knowing comes through in your delivery as a kind of groundedness, a stability, a weight that fabricated stories simply do not have.
Stories work the same way. Firsthand stories have weight. Borrowed stories are lighter, no matter how well you tell them.
The Replacement Experiment
After the stolen-anecdote disaster in Vienna, I decided to find a true story that could do the same job. I needed something personal, something that connected to the theme of wonder and impossibility, something that would make the audience lean in.
The problem — the reason I had borrowed a story in the first place — was that I did not think my own experiences were dramatic enough. I came to magic as an adult. I did not have a childhood moment of wonder at a magic show. I did not have a beloved family member who performed card tricks at the dinner table. My story was more mundane: a man in hotel rooms, alone, learning card moves from online tutorials, slowly falling into a world he had once dismissed.
But that is exactly what made it real.
The story I eventually wrote was about a night in a hotel room in Innsbruck. I was traveling for work, sitting on the bed at eleven at night with a deck of cards and a tutorial video paused on my laptop. I had been trying to get a move right for three days and it was not working. My fingers were sore. The move looked nothing like the tutorial. And I had the thought that every adult learner has at some point: maybe I am too old for this. Maybe you have to start this as a kid. Maybe the window has closed.
And then, on the next attempt — not because anything changed, not because I suddenly had a breakthrough, but just because repetition eventually wins — the move worked. Cleanly. Smoothly. For the first time. And I sat there on the edge of a hotel bed in a city that was not my home, holding a deck of cards in hands that had finally done what I had been asking them to do, and I felt something I had not expected to feel. Wonder. Not at the move itself, but at the fact that I could still learn something this difficult, this late in the game.
That story is not cinematic. It does not have candlelight or exposed brick. It has a tired man on a bed in a chain hotel with sore fingers. But when I tell it on stage, the audience leans in. Not because the story is dramatic. Because it is true. Because they can feel the truth of it in the messy, specific, uncinematic details. Because many of them have had their own version of that moment — the moment when you almost quit and then did not — and the real details of my experience unlock the real emotions of theirs.
The difference between this story and the stolen one is not a difference of quality or construction. The stolen story was actually more dramatic, better structured, more emotionally satisfying in the traditional sense. The difference is honesty. The audience can feel when you have been there, and they can feel when you have not.
The Temptation of Better Stories
Every performer faces this temptation. You hear a great story — at a lecture, in a book, from another performer — and you think: that is so much better than anything that has happened to me. If I could tell that story as my own, my show would be stronger.
Wrong. A better story told without conviction loses to a lesser story told with total honesty. Every time. The audience is not evaluating the quality of your narrative structure. They are evaluating you. And the quickest way to fail that evaluation is to present someone else’s experience as your own.
This does not mean you cannot be inspired by other people’s stories. The story I heard from the other performer — the one about his grandfather — inspired me to look for my own version of that emotional arc. The theme was universal: a moment of wonder that changed your relationship with the impossible. The specific story had to be mine.
Think of it as a template versus a transcript. The template — the emotional arc, the thematic structure, the type of moment — you can borrow freely. The transcript — the specific details, the setting, the characters, the sensory memories — those have to come from your life. If they do not, the audience will feel the gap, even if they cannot name it.
Building Your Story Library
Since that Vienna experience, I have been systematically building what I think of as my story library. Not fabricated stories. Real ones. Every time something happens to me that has emotional weight — a moment of failure, a moment of success, a moment of unexpected connection, a moment of doubt — I write it down. Not as a polished narrative. As raw notes. What happened. Where I was. What I felt. What the room looked like. What someone said.
Most of these notes will never become performance stories. But when I need a story for a specific piece, I go to the library first. And usually, buried in those notes, there is something that fits. Not perfectly. Not as neatly as a fabricated story would. But truthfully. And truthfully beats neatly every single time.
The Paradox of Vulnerability
There is a paradox here that took me a long time to understand. The stories that feel most risky to tell — the ones where you look uncertain, struggling, even foolish — are the ones that build the most connection. The stories that feel safest — the ones where you come out looking competent and wise — are the ones that create the most distance.
This is because vulnerability is the currency of trust. When you tell a story in which you were afraid, confused, or inadequate, you are giving the audience something real. You are showing them a version of yourself that is not curated for the stage. And in that unguarded moment, the audience’s defenses drop too. They stop evaluating and start connecting.
A fabricated story can never achieve this, because fabrication is the opposite of vulnerability. When you make up a story, you are controlling every variable. You are choosing the details, calibrating the emotion, constructing the outcome. The audience senses that control, and control is the enemy of connection.
Tell the true story. The messy, imperfect, unglamorous, too-specific true story. Tell it with the conviction of someone who was actually there, because you were. And trust that the audience’s BS detector — which is more sensitive than you think and more accurate than you want it to be — will reward your honesty with the one thing no fabrication can buy: their trust.
It is not ninety percent of being a successful entertainer. But it might be close.