The recording was from a private event in Innsbruck. I was reviewing footage of a card routine I’d performed dozens of times, and I’d hit play with the intention of checking my timing on a specific moment. Instead, I heard something that made me stop the video and start it over from the beginning.
I heard myself narrating.
“I’m going to take this deck of cards… and I’m going to spread them out on the table like this… now I’m going to ask you to touch one card… go ahead, touch any card you like… great, now I’m going to remove that card from the spread… and I’m going to place it face down right here…”
Every sentence described an action the audience could already see. I was providing a play-by-play commentary of my own performance, as if the audience were listening on the radio instead of sitting three meters away watching with their own eyes. Every word was accurate. Every word was unnecessary. And every unnecessary word was a tiny weight on the performance, dragging it toward boredom.
I counted the narration in that six-minute routine. Forty-one sentences. Twenty-seven of them described visible actions. That’s sixty-six percent of my dialogue devoted to telling people what they were already watching me do. Two-thirds of my script was audiovisual redundancy.
The Play-by-Play Trap
Pete McCabe’s Scripting Magic has a principle that should be printed on every performer’s mirror: eliminate procedural patter. McCabe argues that most performers narrate their own actions out of habit, not intention. They describe what they’re doing because silence feels dangerous, and narration feels safe. If you’re talking, you must be performing. If you’re describing what’s happening, the audience must be following along.
But the opposite is true. Narrating the obvious doesn’t help the audience follow along — they’re already following along because they have eyes. What narration does is reduce the audience to passive listeners rather than active observers. It tells them what to think instead of letting them experience it. It fills space that could be occupied by something far more valuable: meaning, anticipation, humor, or silence.
The principle hit me hard because I recognized it immediately. I wasn’t narrating because I’d decided narration was the best script for the routine. I was narrating because I was afraid of what would happen if I stopped talking. The narration was a security blanket, not a creative choice.
What the Audience Actually Needs
Here’s the question that changed how I write scripts: what does the audience need from my words that they can’t get from watching?
The answer, once I thought about it, was obvious. They need context. They need meaning. They need direction for their emotions. They need to know not what is happening — they can see that — but why it matters.
Consider the difference between these two approaches to the same moment:
Version A (narrating the obvious): “Now I’m going to place this card face down on the table.”
Version B (adding meaning): “This card is going to do something impossible in about five seconds.”
Both versions accompany the same physical action — placing a card on a table. But Version A describes what the audience already sees. Version B creates anticipation for what the audience is about to see. Version A is a caption. Version B is a promise.
The audience doesn’t need captions. They need promises. They need reasons to pay attention. They need emotional direction — cues about whether this moment is scary, funny, mysterious, or beautiful. The physical actions provide the visual information. The words must provide the invisible information: why this moment matters.
The Before-and-After Exercise
After watching that Innsbruck recording, I sat down with the full transcript of my routine and did something painful but transformative. I went through every line and classified it as one of four things:
- Procedural narration — describing a visible action (“I’m shuffling the cards”)
- Necessary instruction — telling the audience or volunteer what to do (“Choose any card”)
- Meaning-making — adding context, emotion, or stakes (“What you’re about to see has never worked perfectly”)
- Engagement — humor, stories, questions, or moments designed to produce one of the Big Three reactions
The results were humbling. Sixty-six percent procedural narration. Fifteen percent necessary instruction. Twelve percent meaning-making. Seven percent engagement.
My script was two-thirds dead weight.
The rewrite took three evenings. I went through every procedural narration line and asked: can I cut this entirely? Can I replace it with something that adds meaning? Can I turn it into engagement?
Many lines could simply be cut. “I’m going to shuffle the cards” — cut. The audience can see me shuffling. No words needed. Silence during a shuffle is not dead air. It’s a moment where the audience watches and processes.
Some lines needed replacement. “Now I’m going to place this card on the table” became “Watch this card. Don’t take your eyes off it.” Same moment, completely different function. The first describes my action. The second directs the audience’s attention and creates expectation. The first is about me. The second is about them.
A few lines got expanded into genuine engagement moments. “I’m going to ask you to think of any card” became a whole sequence about how freely they were choosing, how nobody was influencing them, how the decision existed entirely in their mind — building the stakes for the revelation to come. The simple instruction blossomed into a dramatic setup.
The Silence Discovery
The most surprising part of the rewrite was discovering how much better the routine worked with less talking.
There were moments where the best replacement for procedural narration was not better narration but no narration at all. Just silence. Just the audience watching the actions unfold without commentary.
A card being placed on a table in silence is more dramatic than a card being placed on a table while someone says “I’m placing the card on the table.” The silence creates a gap that the audience fills with their own anticipation. The narration fills that gap with redundant information, leaving no room for the audience’s imagination to work.
When I performed the rewritten routine for the first time at a corporate event in Vienna, the difference was immediate and tangible. The moments of silence felt charged rather than empty. The audience leaned in during the quiet parts. And when I did speak, the words landed harder because they weren’t competing with a constant stream of narration.
Writing From Their Side of the Table
The root cause of procedural narration is that most performers write from their own perspective. When you’re scripting a routine, you’re thinking about what you’re doing — the sequence of actions, the order of operations, the physical procedure. It’s natural to describe what you’re thinking about. You’re thinking about placing the card on the table, so you write “I’m placing the card on the table.”
The fix is to write from the audience’s perspective. The audience isn’t thinking about your actions. They’re thinking about what those actions mean, what’s going to happen next, and whether they should be excited, nervous, or amused. Your words should serve their experience, not document yours.
Here’s a practical exercise that works for me. After writing any script, I go through it and for every line, I ask: “If I were sitting in the audience and could see everything, would these words tell me something I don’t already know?” If the answer is no, the line goes.
Then I ask a second question: “What is the audience feeling at this moment, and what words could I use to intensify that feeling?” If they’re curious, make them more curious. If they’re tense, make them more tense. If they’re amused, lean into the humor. The words should be an amplifier for the audience’s emotional experience, not a documentary of the performer’s physical experience.
The Five Replacements
Through trial and error, I’ve found five categories of language that work better than procedural narration:
Anticipation builders: “In a moment, something is going to happen that I can’t explain.” This points toward the future. It creates expectation. It gives the audience a reason to keep watching.
Attention directors: “Watch her hands. Don’t look at me — watch her.” This tells the audience where to look, which is genuinely useful information they can’t get from watching. It’s guidance, not narration.
Emotional framing: “This is the part that keeps me up at night.” This tells the audience how to feel about what’s happening. It’s invisible information — they can’t see your inner state, so sharing it genuinely adds something.
Significance markers: “This is the one moment in the entire show where everything could go wrong.” This tells the audience that what’s happening matters. It raises the stakes. It converts a mundane action into a dramatic moment.
Questions that create investment: “Do you think she’ll get it right?” This redirects the audience from passive observation to active prediction. They now have a stake in the outcome because they’ve committed to a position.
None of these describe what the audience can already see. All of them add something the audience couldn’t get from watching alone.
The Gradual Purge
I won’t pretend this transformation happened overnight. Procedural narration is deeply habitual. Even after the rewrite, I’d catch myself falling back into narration during live performances — especially during moments of stress, when the automatic script takes over.
My approach was gradual. One routine at a time. Rewrite, rehearse, perform, record, review, catch the spots where narration crept back in, rewrite again.
Over about three months, the procedural narration dropped from roughly sixty-six percent to maybe fifteen percent. I’ll never get it to zero — some actions genuinely need verbal accompaniment, especially with volunteers who need to understand a sequence. But the goal isn’t zero narration. The goal is zero unnecessary narration.
The Test That Keeps Me Honest
Here’s the test I use now, and I’ll share it because it’s simple enough to apply to any performance context, not just magic.
Record yourself performing. Transcribe what you say. Highlight every sentence that describes something the audience can already see. Then read only the highlighted sentences aloud. If it sounds like a sports commentary — “He picks up the ball. He throws the ball. He catches the ball” — you have a narration problem.
Now read only the non-highlighted sentences. These are the words that are actually doing work. If they form a coherent, engaging narrative on their own — if they create anticipation, meaning, emotion, and engagement without the procedural captions — your script is strong.
The first time I did this test, the non-highlighted sentences were incoherent fragments. The actual content of my script, stripped of narration, was barely a script at all. It was narration with occasional content, rather than content with occasional narration.
That realization was one of the most productive moments of discomfort in my performing life. Because once I saw the problem clearly, the solution was obvious. Stop describing what they can see. Start shaping what they feel.
Every word earns its place or gets cut. That’s the standard. Not every word sounds good. Not every word fills silence. Every word earns its place by adding something the audience couldn’t get from their eyes alone.
The silence between those earned words is where the magic lives.