I used to think of a magic routine the way I think of a project plan. There is a starting point. There is a series of steps. There is a deliverable at the end. The audience sees A, then B, then C, and at the end something impossible has happened. Project complete. Applause.
This is, I have come to believe, a fundamentally broken way to think about performance.
It treats the routine as a logical sequence. The audience follows the plot, arrives at the surprise, and reacts. The performer’s job is to execute the sequence cleanly and land the ending. If the method works and the reveal is strong, the job is done.
But this framework ignores something critical. It ignores the fact that the audience is not just processing information during a routine. They are feeling things. Moment by moment, beat by beat, they are experiencing emotions — curiosity, tension, amusement, confusion, anticipation, relief, astonishment. These emotions are not random side effects of watching magic. They are the performance. They are the entire reason the audience is there.
When I started thinking about the emotional architecture of a routine — the deliberate, planned sequence of feelings I wanted the audience to experience from the first word to the final moment — everything about how I construct my material changed.
The Moment I Saw the Architecture
I was watching a video of a performer I admire, and I noticed something peculiar about the audience. At a specific moment early in the routine, before anything impossible had happened, the audience was already leaning forward. Their body language had shifted from casual observation to active engagement. Something had hooked them.
It was not the magic. The magic had not started yet. It was the emotional setup. The performer had created a feeling — a sense of anticipation mixed with just enough uncertainty to make the audience invested in what was about to happen. He had built an emotional foundation before laying the first brick of impossibility.
I rewound the video and watched the opening thirty seconds five times, trying to understand what he was doing. And what I saw was architecture. Not just a sequence of actions, but a deliberate emotional structure. He started with warmth and humor to lower the audience’s defenses. Then he introduced a premise that created curiosity. Then he escalated the stakes slightly, adding a thread of tension. By the time the first magical moment arrived, the audience was emotionally primed to react to it.
None of this was accidental. It was designed.
What I Mean by Emotional Architecture
Think of a routine as a building. The method — the secret mechanics — is the foundation. It has to be solid, but nobody sees it. The plot — what the audience perceives as the sequence of events — is the structure, the walls and floors and rooms. But the emotional architecture is the interior design. It is what determines how people feel when they are inside the building. Two buildings can have identical structures but completely different atmospheres based on how the space is shaped, lit, and furnished.
The emotional architecture of a routine is the planned sequence of emotional states you want to create in the audience. Not just the big moments — the climax, the reveal, the impossible ending — but every moment. What should they feel when you first address them? What should they feel when the volunteer comes up? What should they feel during the quiet setup phase before the first effect? What should they feel in the beat of silence before the climax?
Every one of these moments carries an emotional payload. Most performers leave those payloads to chance, focusing exclusively on the method and the ending. But the best performances I have seen — the ones that made me sit back in my chair and think, “That was something extraordinary” — had clearly been designed from the emotional payload outward.
My First Attempt at Mapping
I started trying to map the emotional journey of my routines after reading Scott Alexander’s description of how a good stand-up act should have “layers and peaks and valleys” — moving from high energy to low-key, from comedy to emotional moments. He was talking about an entire show, but I realized the same principle applies within a single routine.
My first attempt was crude. I took a routine I had been performing at corporate keynotes in Vienna and wrote out the script beat by beat. Then, next to each beat, I wrote the emotion I wanted the audience to feel at that moment. The result looked something like this:
Opening line. Emotion: amusement, relaxation. Introduction of premise. Emotion: curiosity. Invitation of participant. Emotion: warmth, slight tension. First phase. Emotion: surprise, growing curiosity. Build to climax. Emotion: anticipation, tension. Climax. Emotion: astonishment, delight. Closing line. Emotion: warmth, connection.
Even this simple mapping revealed something uncomfortable. My routine had two problems. First, the early phases were emotionally flat. I was spending time on setup and explanation without creating any emotional engagement. The audience was processing information but not feeling anything. Second, there was no variation in the middle. The routine went from mild curiosity to astonishment in a straight, monotone escalation with no dips, no surprises in the emotional texture, no moments of release before the next build.
Compare that to a well-designed piece of music. A song does not simply get louder from beginning to end. It has dynamics. It builds, then pulls back. It creates tension, then releases it. It surprises you with a quiet moment after a loud passage or a sudden intensity after a gentle verse. These dynamics are what make music emotionally compelling. A straight line from quiet to loud is boring. The variation is what moves you.
My routine was a straight line. Method, method, method, reveal. Flat, flat, flat, loud. Functional, but emotionally inert.
Redesigning From the Emotion Outward
Once I saw the problem, I started redesigning my routines from the emotional journey outward.
The first thing I changed was the opening. Instead of jumping straight into the premise, I started opening with a moment of genuine personal connection. A story about how I discovered this particular concept. A confession of vulnerability. A joke at my own expense. Something that created an emotional state — warmth, amusement, relatability — before any magic happened.
This is something Derren Brown writes about compellingly. He describes how most of the magic happens after the trick is over, when the spectator tries to reconstruct what happened. But I think the opposite is equally true: much of the magic also happens before the trick begins, when the audience’s emotional state is being shaped by the performer’s presence, words, and energy. If the audience is emotionally engaged before the first impossible moment, that moment hits exponentially harder.
The second thing I changed was adding what I think of as emotional valleys — deliberate moments of calm, humor, or intimacy in between the peaks of impossibility. In one routine, I added a beat where I pause after the first surprising moment and simply acknowledge the volunteer’s reaction. A genuine, unhurried moment where I am not performing, not advancing the plot, just being present with another person’s surprise. This beat costs me maybe five seconds. But it creates a dip in the emotional contour that makes the next peak feel higher by contrast.
The third change was the hardest. I started planning the specific emotion I wanted the audience to feel at the climax, and then working backward from that emotion to design everything that came before it.
Most magicians design forward. They start with a method, build a routine around it, and hope the ending creates astonishment. Designing backward means starting with the question: what do I want the audience to feel at the peak moment? Amazement? Delight? Unease? Joy? Wonder? Each of these is a different emotional target, and each requires a different emotional setup.
If I want the climax to feel joyful, I need the preceding beats to create warmth and connection, so that the impossible moment feels like a gift rather than a puzzle. If I want the climax to feel eerie and unsettling, I need the preceding beats to create just enough tension and mystery that the impossible moment feels genuinely uncanny. The ending does not exist in isolation. It exists as the culmination of an emotional journey, and if the journey is wrong, the ending will land wrong no matter how strong the method is.
The Consulting Parallel
My work in strategy consulting gave me an unexpected framework for this. In consulting, we talk about the “so what” — the conclusion the client needs to reach at the end of a presentation. Good consultants do not just build a logical argument toward the “so what.” They design the emotional journey the client takes through the presentation. They start with what the client currently believes, create enough dissonance to open them to new thinking, present evidence that builds a new understanding, and arrive at the “so what” with the client feeling not just convinced but energized to act.
Bad consultants present information. Good consultants design emotional journeys through information.
The same distinction applies to magic. Bad performers present effects. Good performers design emotional journeys through effects.
I started applying consulting frameworks to my routine design. Stakeholder analysis became audience analysis: who are these people, what emotional state are they arriving in, what do they care about? The narrative arc of a consulting presentation — establish context, create tension, resolve with insight — became the narrative arc of a routine. Even the pacing principles transferred: never stay at one emotional level for too long, always vary the intensity, always give the audience a moment to process before the next major beat.
What I Map Now
My current mapping process for a new routine looks roughly like this.
I start by identifying the emotional peak — the single most intense emotional moment in the routine. Usually this is the climax, but not always. Sometimes the most powerful emotional moment is a quiet beat before the climax, or a moment of connection after it.
Then I identify the emotional baseline — where the audience starts. At a corporate keynote, they usually start with polite, slightly guarded attention. At a private event, they might start with warmth and curiosity. The baseline determines how much emotional work I need to do to get them to the peak.
Then I plot the journey between baseline and peak. This journey should not be a straight line. It should have at least one significant dip — a moment where the emotional intensity drops — and at least one unexpected turn — a moment where the emotional texture shifts in a way the audience does not anticipate.
Finally, I plan the landing. What emotion do I want to leave them with? This is not always the same emotion as the peak. The peak might be astonishment, but the landing might be warmth. The peak might be tension, but the landing might be relief and laughter. The transition from peak emotion to landing emotion is one of the most important moments in a routine, and it is almost always neglected.
The Rehearsal Challenge
The hardest part of emotional architecture is that you cannot rehearse it alone. You can practice the method alone. You can rehearse the script alone. You can run the blocking alone in your hotel room. But you cannot feel the emotional contour of a routine without an audience, because emotions are co-created. The audience is not just receiving your emotional design — they are participating in it, feeding back energy and reactions that shape the moment in real time.
This means that the emotional architecture of a routine is never fully designed on paper. It is designed through iteration. You map what you intend, you perform it, you feel what actually happens, and you adjust. The map is a starting point, not a final blueprint.
I have routines that took six or seven performances before the emotional architecture felt right. The method worked from the first performance. The plot was clear from the first performance. But the emotional journey took time to calibrate, because I was learning how audiences actually respond at each beat and adjusting my pacing, my language, my energy to shape those responses more precisely.
Architecture, Not Decoration
The key insight, the thing I want to make absolutely clear, is that emotional architecture is not decoration. It is not something you add on top of a well-designed trick to make it fancier. It is the foundation of what makes a trick feel like an experience.
A routine without emotional architecture can still be impressive. The method can be clean, the reveal can be strong, the audience can clap. But it will not move anyone. It will not create the kind of reaction that makes someone grab their friend’s arm and say, “Did you see that?” It will not be the thing they remember three months later.
The routines that create those reactions are the ones where every moment has been designed not just for what happens, but for how it feels. Where the performer has thought not only about the sequence of events but about the sequence of emotions. Where the emotional journey has been planned with the same care and precision that most performers reserve only for the method.
That is emotional architecture. And it is, I believe, the difference between performing a trick and creating an experience.