There is a moment in any creative process where you realize the hard part is not inventing something new. The hard part is recognizing what already exists and understanding why it stopped being used.
I had this realization late one night in a hotel room in Innsbruck, paging through a magic text published in the 1930s. I had been reading methodically, flagging effects, making notes in the margins, following the process I had developed for mining classic texts. And I kept finding effects that were brilliant. Not “brilliant for their era.” Brilliant, full stop. Effects with clear, dramatic, visually compelling audience experiences that had simply fallen out of circulation.
The question that kept nagging me was not “why is nobody doing these?” — I understood the accessibility barrier, the perception that old equals outdated, the gravitational pull of modern online tutorials. The question was: “How do you take one of these forgotten effects and actually bring it back to life?”
Scott Alexander’s lecture notes gave me the answer. Or more precisely, the systematic approach that Alexander and his collaborator Puck have developed gave me a framework I could actually apply.
The Alexander-Puck Process
What Alexander describes in his notes is not a casual approach. It is a deliberate, systematic method for identifying, evaluating, and modernizing classic material. He and Puck do not stumble across old effects by accident. They mine classic texts intentionally, with specific criteria in mind and a clear process for transforming what they find into material that works for modern audiences.
The process, as I understand it from studying Alexander’s descriptions and applying it to my own work, breaks down into distinct phases.
First, they identify the core effect. Not the method, not the presentation, not the staging — the core experience the audience would have. What would someone see? What would they remember? If they described it to a friend over dinner, what would they say? This is the essence of the piece, stripped of everything that is specific to the era in which it was created.
Second, they evaluate whether that core effect still resonates. This is not always a given. Some effects rely on cultural contexts that no longer exist — references that modern audiences would not understand, objects that have fallen out of common use, social dynamics that have shifted. But most effects pass this test, because the fundamental impossibilities that astonish audiences are rooted in physics and psychology, not culture. Objects appearing where they should not be, vanishing when they should still be there, moving from one place to another without visible means — these experiences are timeless because they violate the same physical laws that have always governed the world.
Third, they strip away the dated presentation. This is where most of the creative work happens. The original presentation was designed for a specific era — specific performance contexts, specific audience expectations, specific theatrical conventions. A parlor effect from the 1890s was presented in the formal, declamatory style of the Victorian stage. A vaudeville piece from the 1920s was presented with the rapid-fire energy and broad comedy of variety theater. These presentational choices were perfect for their time and are often wrong for ours.
Fourth, they rebuild the presentation from scratch. New premise. New patter. New staging. New energy. The core effect remains, but everything surrounding it is designed for a contemporary performer working for a contemporary audience. The method may be simplified or streamlined, but the experience the audience has is the same experience that made the effect a hit when it was first performed — just delivered in a package that feels current and real.
Why This Works Better Than Invention
I came to magic from the world of strategy consulting, where one of the fundamental principles is that you should not build from scratch what you can adapt from proven models. In business, this is obvious. Nobody starts a company by reinventing accounting, human resources, and supply chain management from first principles. You adopt proven frameworks and customize them for your specific context.
In magic, the culture runs in the opposite direction. There is an overwhelming emphasis on originality, on creating “new” effects, on being the performer who does things nobody else does. This emphasis is not entirely wrong — a distinctive repertoire is valuable. But it leads to a chronic undervaluation of adaptation, and it causes performers to spend enormous creative energy reinventing things that were already invented and perfected decades ago.
What Alexander and Puck demonstrate is that adaptation from classic texts produces results that are, from the audience’s perspective, indistinguishable from original creation. The audience cannot tell whether you invented an effect last year or adapted it from a text published in 1932. They do not care. They care about the experience. And a well-adapted classic, rebuilt with a modern presentation and performed with genuine conviction, provides an experience that is often stronger than a newly invented effect that has not had the benefit of decades of audience testing.
Darwin Ortiz makes a related point in Designing Miracles when he argues that method should serve effect, never the other way around. The implication is that the source of the method is irrelevant. What matters is whether the audience experience is powerful, clear, and emotionally resonant. If a method from 1910 serves the effect better than a method invented last month, the 1910 method is the right choice. History is not a handicap. It is a quality filter.
Applying the Framework to My Own Material
I started applying the Alexander-Puck framework to my own material development about eighteen months ago, and the results have been instructive.
My first attempt was a disaster, and I think the disaster is worth describing because it illustrates the most common mistake in this process: falling in love with the method instead of the effect.
I had found an effect in an early twentieth-century text that used a particularly clever mechanical principle. The method was ingenious — a beautiful piece of engineering that solved a seemingly impossible problem in an elegant way. I was enchanted by the cleverness of it. I spent two weeks building the necessary apparatus, another week developing a presentation, and then performed it at a small corporate event in Graz.
The audience was thoroughly confused.
Not impressed. Not astonished. Confused. The effect, it turned out, required several steps of setup that the audience found difficult to follow. The mechanical cleverness that had enchanted me was invisible to the audience — they could not appreciate the elegance of the method because they did not know the method existed. And the audience experience, once I stripped away my admiration for the mechanism and looked at it honestly, was muddled. If I asked someone in that audience to describe what they had seen, they would have struggled to give a coherent answer.
I had committed the exact error Alexander’s framework is designed to prevent. I had started with the method instead of the effect. I had fallen in love with the cleverness of how it worked rather than evaluating what the audience would actually experience.
My second attempt was better. I found a different effect in a different classic text, and this time I started by writing down the audience experience in one sentence. Not what happened mechanically. What the audience would see and feel. If that sentence was compelling — if it described an experience that would make someone lean forward and say “wait, what?” — then the effect was worth developing. If the sentence was complicated, confusing, or required explanation, the effect was not ready.
The one-sentence description was clear and compelling. I stripped the original presentation, which involved a lengthy patter about a historical figure that no modern audience would find interesting. I rebuilt the presentation around a theme that connected to my keynote work — a metaphor about strategic thinking and unexpected outcomes that I could weave naturally into a conference talk. I simplified two elements of the handling that were unnecessarily complex for modern performance conditions.
The first time I performed the rebuilt version, at a technology conference in Vienna, the reaction was exactly what Alexander describes in his notes. The audience responded as if they were seeing something completely new. Which, from their perspective, they were. Nobody in that room had ever seen this effect. Nobody they knew had ever described it to them. It existed entirely outside their frame of reference for what magic could look like, because it had been sitting in a book for eighty years, waiting for someone to dust it off.
The Three Questions
Based on my experience applying the Alexander-Puck framework, and the mistakes I made along the way, I have distilled the process down to three questions that I now ask about any classic effect I am considering for adaptation.
First: can I describe the audience experience in one clear sentence? If the description is complicated, the effect is probably too convoluted. Classic effects that endure tend to have extraordinarily clean audience experiences. If the original text describes something that requires a paragraph to explain, the effect may not be worth the adaptation effort.
Second: what is the emotional quality of the experience? Not all effects are built to astonish. Some are built to charm. Some are built to create tension. Some are built to produce laughter. Understanding the emotional quality of the effect tells you where it fits in a show and what kind of presentation it needs. A charming effect rebuilt with a dramatic presentation will not work, no matter how clean the method is.
Third: can I perform this in the contexts where I actually work? This is the practicality filter. I perform primarily in corporate settings — conference stages, dinner events, keynote presentations. An effect that requires a full theatrical stage with wing space and rigging is not practical for me, no matter how strong it is. An effect that can be performed surrounded, with minimal props, in variable lighting conditions, is far more valuable for my specific needs.
These three questions eliminate most of the effects I flag during my reading. Out of a hundred flagged effects, perhaps ten pass all three questions. Out of those ten, perhaps three are strong enough to warrant the investment of time required to develop a full modern presentation.
That ratio might sound discouraging. It is actually liberating. It means that the evaluation process does most of the work for you. You do not need to develop every interesting effect you find. You need to develop only the ones that pass every test.
What Puck Brings to the Partnership
Alexander mentions Puck repeatedly in his notes, and there is something worth noting about what a collaborator brings to this process.
When you mine classic texts alone, you are limited by your own aesthetic preferences, your own blind spots, and your own performance style. A collaborator sees different things in the same material. They flag effects you would have passed over. They challenge your assumptions about what will and will not work. They provide a second perspective on the audience experience, which is invaluable because the single hardest thing in magic is seeing your own material from the audience’s point of view.
I have this kind of relationship with Adam Wilber through Vulpine Creations. When one of us finds something promising in a classic text, we discuss it. We argue about whether the audience experience is strong enough. We push back on each other’s assumptions. And more than once, Adam has convinced me that an effect I had dismissed was actually a gem, or that an effect I was excited about was not as strong as I thought.
This collaborative evaluation process is, I think, one of the reasons the Alexander-Puck partnership has been so productive. Two sets of eyes, two different aesthetic sensibilities, two different performance contexts. The effects that survive both perspectives are the ones most likely to work for a broad range of audiences.
The Living Library
I have come to think of classic magic texts as a living library. Not a dead archive. Not a museum of historical curiosities. A living collection of material that is available for any performer who is willing to do the work of reading, evaluating, and adapting.
The key insight from studying Alexander and Puck’s approach is that this work is systematic, not romantic. It is not about having a mystical connection with old books. It is not about being a magic historian. It is about having a clear process: identify the core effect, evaluate the audience experience, strip the dated presentation, rebuild for modern performance. Repeat.
Anyone can do this. You do not need to be Scott Alexander or Puck. You do not need decades of experience. You need a classic text, a set of evaluation criteria, and the willingness to invest the time required to transform a written description into a performed reality.
The material is sitting there, in volumes that most magicians have on their shelves but have never read cover to cover. Thousands of effects, proven by generations of performers, waiting for someone to notice them. The process for bringing them back to life is not a secret. It is a skill. And like every skill in magic, it gets better with practice.
Start mining. The best material you will ever perform might already be written.