I was reviewing a video of myself performing at a corporate event in Linz — maybe seventy people, a nice room, good lighting, decent sound — and I was cringing. Not because the performance was bad. The effects worked. The audience responded. The show was fine.
I was cringing because I was listening to myself narrate my own actions like a tour guide describing a painting.
“I’m going to take this deck of cards and shuffle them.” You can see me shuffling them. Why am I telling you?
“Now I’ll place this envelope on the table.” You are watching me place the envelope on the table. The information is redundant before the sentence is finished.
“I’ll just write something on this piece of paper.” You can see the pen. You can see the paper. You can see me writing. What exactly is being added by the commentary?
Nothing. Nothing was being added. I was filling silence with description, and the description was doing nothing except treating a room full of intelligent adults like they had lost the ability to see.
The Procedural Patter Problem
Pete McCabe addresses this directly in Scripting Magic: take every line that narrates your action and replace it with a line that comments on the action, or eliminate it entirely. The principle is simple. If the audience can see what you are doing, you do not need to tell them what you are doing. What remains, after you strip out the obvious, should be meaningful.
Eugene Burger, one of the most thoughtful performers and writers in magic, distilled it even further: “Don’t talk so much, and slow down.”
When I first encountered these ideas, I thought they were aimed at other performers. Less experienced ones. Beginners who did not know better. Certainly not me. I was past that stage. I had scripts. I had rehearsed. I was a serious student of the craft.
Then I watched that video from Linz, and I counted. In a fifteen-minute set, I narrated a visible action seventeen times. Seventeen. More than once per minute, I was telling the audience something they could already see.
The realization was uncomfortable. I had been doing this for months, probably longer, and I had never noticed. It had become so habitual that it was invisible to me — which is ironic, given that the whole point of the narration was to describe things that were already visible.
Why We Do It
Before I could fix the problem, I needed to understand why I was doing it in the first place. Why does a performer narrate their own actions? It is not stupidity. It is not laziness. There are real psychological reasons, and understanding them made it easier to break the habit.
The first reason is fear of silence. When you are on stage and you are doing something physical — shuffling a deck, writing on a pad, placing an object somewhere — there is a natural silence while you work. And for many performers, silence is terrifying. Silence feels like dead air. Silence feels like losing the audience. So you fill it. You say something, anything, to keep the connection alive. And the easiest thing to say is a description of what you are physically doing, because it requires no creativity. It is just narration of the visible.
The second reason is the illusion of engagement. When you are talking, you feel like you are connecting with the audience. The words are flowing. Your voice is filling the room. There is an active link between you and them. But this is an illusion. Words that describe visible actions are not engagement. They are noise. The audience is not more connected to you because you told them you are shuffling the cards. They are, if anything, slightly less connected, because you have just signaled that you think they need to be told what their own eyes are showing them.
The third reason, and this one is specific to magic, is habit inherited from instructions. When you learn a new piece, the instructions often include procedural patter. “Say to the audience: I am going to shuffle these cards thoroughly.” The instructions include it because they need to describe the sequence of events, and the patter serves as a marker for what happens when. But the instructions are describing a method, not a performance. The procedural patter is scaffolding, not architecture. It was never meant to be the final script. And yet, for many performers — myself very much included — the instructional patter becomes the permanent patter because we never go back and replace it with something better.
The Experiment
After the Linz video, I decided to run an experiment. I took the same fifteen-minute set and I went through the script with a single rule: every line that describes a visible action gets cut. No exceptions. No replacements. Just cut.
The result was startling. The script lost about thirty percent of its words. Thirty percent. Nearly a third of everything I was saying on stage was procedural narration of things the audience could already see.
What remained was the good stuff. The stories. The humor. The questions directed at spectators. The lines that built anticipation. The lines that created atmosphere. The lines that served a purpose beyond stating the obvious.
The first time I performed the trimmed version, I was nervous. I was worried about the silences. Those moments where I used to say “Now I’ll shuffle the cards” were now just… moments where I shuffled the cards. In silence. Or with a meaningful pause. Or with a look at the audience that said more than any narration could.
And the audience did not seem confused. They did not look lost. They did not turn to each other and whisper, “What is he doing? If only he would tell us.” They watched. They followed along perfectly. Because, and this should not have been a revelation but it was, adults can see.
What Silence Does
Here is what I did not expect: the silences were better than the narration. When I stopped talking during physical actions, the audience paid more attention to what I was doing. Without the narration providing a safety net, their eyes locked on my hands, on the props, on the physical reality of the moment. The silence created focus in a way that words never had.
There is a simple explanation for this. When you are talking, the audience’s processing resources are split between listening and watching. They are doing two things at once. When you are silent, their entire attention goes to what they can see. The visual experience becomes stronger because it is not competing with an auditory channel.
This matters enormously for magic. The visual moment — the impossible thing happening before their eyes — is the core of the experience. Anything that competes with the audience’s visual attention during a key moment is working against you. And procedural narration, by definition, competes with visual attention. You are asking the audience to listen to a description of something they should be watching.
The best performers I have studied understand this intuitively. They go silent during the critical moments. They let the audience see without commentary. They trust that the visual is strong enough to hold attention without verbal support. And the audience, freed from the distraction of narration, experiences the magic more fully.
The Replacement Question
Some performers, when told to cut procedural narration, panic. “But what do I say instead? I can’t just stand there in silence the whole time.” And they are right that a performance should not be entirely silent — unless you are specifically building a silent piece to music, which is a different discussion.
The answer is not to replace narration with different narration. It is to replace narration with content. With something that adds value. Something the audience cannot get from their own eyes.
Instead of “I’m going to shuffle these cards,” you might say something that builds the moment. Something about the spectator, the situation, the theme of the piece. Something funny. Something that raises a question. Something that creates anticipation for what is about to happen. Anything that serves the experience rather than describing the activity.
Or you might say nothing. A meaningful silence is infinitely more powerful than a meaningless sentence. When you shuffle cards in silence, with focus and intention, the audience reads competence and seriousness. When you shuffle cards while saying “I’m going to shuffle these cards,” the audience reads a performer who does not trust the moment to work on its own.
The distinction Pete McCabe draws is between narrative patter and commentary patter. Narrative patter describes what is happening: “Now I place the card face down on the table.” Commentary patter adds something to what is happening: “This is the moment where most people start to get nervous.” The first is a news report. The second is an experience. The first states the obvious. The second creates meaning.
The Deeper Principle: Respect Your Audience’s Intelligence
Underneath the tactical question of what to say and what to cut is a philosophical question about how you view your audience. Do you see them as passive recipients who need to be guided through every moment? Or do you see them as intelligent adults who are perfectly capable of following along without a running commentary?
The answer has implications beyond procedural narration. If you trust your audience’s intelligence, you stop over-explaining everything. You stop setting up effects with lengthy preambles about what is about to happen. You stop asking “Did everyone see that?” after a visual moment — they did, they have functioning eyes. You stop saying “This is important” before a key moment — if it is important, your performance should make that clear without the label.
The Audit Process
Since the Linz experiment, I have built a specific audit into my script review process. After I finish a script draft, I go through it with a highlighter — or, more accurately, with a digital equivalent — and I mark every line that describes a visible action. Every “I will now” and “let me just” and “as you can see” and “I’m going to” followed by a description of something the audience is about to watch me do.
Then I evaluate each highlighted line individually. Does this line add anything that the audience cannot get from watching? Does it build anticipation? Does it create humor? Does it serve the theme? Or is it just noise — verbal filler that exists because I was afraid of silence?
If it is noise, it goes. No exceptions. Even if it means the script feels bare afterward. Even if it means I have to sit with the discomfort of silence during a physical action. Even if it means the script loses twenty or thirty percent of its words.
What remains, after the audit, is lean. Tight. Every line serving a purpose. And the silences where the narration used to be are not gaps. They are space. Space for the audience to see. Space for the physical action to carry its own weight. Space for the moment to breathe.
The Counterintuitive Result
The strangest thing about cutting procedural narration is that the show feels longer, not shorter. You would think that removing thirty percent of the words would make a fifteen-minute set feel rushed. It does not. It feels more spacious. More deliberate. More confident.
The remaining words have room to land. When every sentence is meaningful, the audience gives each sentence more weight. When every silence is intentional, the audience reads those silences as confidence and presence.
Your audience is smarter than you think. They can see what you are doing. They do not need a play-by-play. What they need is you — fully present, saying only what matters, trusting them to follow along.
Cut the obvious. Keep the meaningful. And give your audience the respect of assuming they have eyes.