There is a moment in a keynote I perform at corporate events where I ask someone in the audience to think of a word — any word that matters to them. The first thing I say in the routine is: “Words are strange things. We use thousands of them every day and forget almost all of them. But some words stick.” The last thing I say, after the impossible has happened and the word they were thinking of has appeared where no one could have written it, is: “Some words stick.”
The audience does not consciously register that the opening and closing lines echo each other. But they feel it. The routine feels complete. It feels like it went somewhere and came back. It feels, for lack of a better word, right.
I did not discover this technique on my own. I found it in Pete McCabe’s writing on scripting, where he makes a deceptively simple observation: a line you can recall in your last line is worth trying as a first line. When your opening and closing lines echo each other, the performance feels whole.
That one sentence changed how I build every routine.
The Psychology of Closure
Humans are wired for completion. We want patterns to resolve. We want stories to end. We want the note to land. This is not a performance principle — it is a cognitive principle. The Gestalt psychologists called it the law of closure: our minds naturally complete incomplete patterns, and we experience satisfaction when a pattern resolves as expected.
Circular narrative structure exploits this wiring. When the last line echoes the first, the audience experiences a kind of cognitive resolution that is deeply satisfying, even when the content between those two bookends is wildly surprising. The surprise of the magic lives inside the frame of the narrative, and the frame itself feels solid and intentional.
This matters more in magic than in most other performance contexts, because magic is inherently destabilizing. The whole point is to show the audience something that should not be possible. That destabilization needs to live inside something that feels stable and controlled, or the audience experiences confusion rather than wonder. The circular structure provides that stability. The frame says: I know what I am doing. This was planned. You are in safe hands.
How I Discovered I Was Already Doing It (Badly)
Before I encountered the circular structure concept explicitly, I was already using it — accidentally and inconsistently. I had a few routines where the opening and closing happened to rhyme thematically, and those routines always felt stronger. I had other routines where the opening and closing had nothing to do with each other, and those routines always felt like they just… stopped. They ended but they did not conclude.
The difference between ending and concluding is the difference between a sentence that stops mid-thought and a sentence that arrives at its period. Both cease. Only one completes.
Once I noticed this pattern, I went through my working repertoire and mapped the opening and closing lines of every routine. The results were revealing. The routines that audiences responded to most strongly — the ones that got the best reactions, the most applause, the most post-show comments — almost all had some form of circular structure, even if I had not designed it intentionally. The routines that felt weak almost all lacked it.
Correlation is not causation, obviously. But it was enough of a pattern to make me pay attention.
Building the Circle Deliberately
The first routine where I deliberately built a circular structure was a piece about perception that I perform in keynotes on innovation. The theme is how confidently we interpret the world and how frequently those interpretations are wrong.
I wrote the closing first. I knew I wanted to end with a moment where the audience realizes that something they were certain about from the beginning of the routine was actually not what it appeared. The closing line was: “You were sure. And you were wrong. And that is the most interesting place to be.”
From that closing, I reverse-engineered the opening: “There is a question I ask every team I work with in my consulting. How sure are you? And the answer is always the same. Very sure. Completely sure.”
The echo is “sure” and “wrong.” The opening establishes certainty. The closing reveals that certainty was misplaced. The audience travels from confidence to surprise, and the circular structure makes that journey feel designed rather than accidental.
The middle of the routine — the actual performance, the magic, the impossible moments — lives inside this frame. The audience is not just watching a trick. They are inside a story about the nature of certainty. And when the story comes full circle, the trick is no longer a demonstration. It is a proof. It is the embodied argument of the narrative.
The Screenwriting Connection
McCabe draws this technique from screenwriting, and the connection is worth understanding. In film, the best screenplays often open and close in the same location, with the same imagery, or with the same line of dialogue — but the meaning has changed because of everything that happened in between. The opening of a film shows a house. The closing shows the same house. But the character has changed, and so the house means something different.
This is exactly what happens in a well-structured magic routine. The opening line means one thing. The closing line — the same words or a clear echo of them — means something different, because the audience has been through an impossible experience in between. The words have not changed. The audience has.
That shift in meaning is one of the most powerful effects available to a performer, and it costs nothing. No special props. No difficult technique. Just a thoughtful choice about which words to use and where to place them.
Three Approaches to the Circle
As I have experimented with circular structure over the past couple of years, I have found three approaches that work.
The first is the literal echo. The closing line repeats the opening line word for word. “Some words stick” at the beginning and “some words stick” at the end. This is the simplest form, and it works when the repeated line gains new meaning from context.
The second is the thematic echo. The closing line does not repeat the opening words, but it returns to the same idea from a different angle. The opening might say “We use thousands of words every day and forget almost all of them.” The closing might say “But you will not forget this one.” The idea — the persistence of certain words — is the same. The specific language is different. This feels slightly more sophisticated because the audience senses the connection without it being stated explicitly.
The third is the inversion. The closing line directly contradicts the opening line, and the contradiction is the point. “I am going to show you something impossible” at the beginning. “I did not show you anything. You showed yourselves” at the end. The circle is not a repetition but a reversal, and the routine is the journey from one position to its opposite.
Each approach creates a different emotional texture. The literal echo feels satisfying and almost musical. The thematic echo feels layered and thoughtful. The inversion feels provocative and lingers after the performance ends.
Why Magicians Need This More Than Other Performers
A standup comedian can end a set with a callback to an earlier joke and get a big laugh. A musician can reprise a theme in the final movement. These are circular structures too. But magicians need them more urgently, because magic routines without narrative structure feel like demonstrations.
A demonstration has a beginning and an end but no arc. It starts, things happen, it stops. The audience has no framework for the experience beyond “that was impressive” or “I don’t know how they did that.” Circular narrative structure gives the audience a framework. It says: this experience had a shape. It went somewhere and came back. It meant something.
That framework is the difference between a trick the audience forgets by the time they reach their car and a performance they mention at dinner that evening. The content might be identical. The structure is what makes one memorable and the other disposable.
The Practical Discipline
Building circular structure into every routine requires a discipline that I initially resisted. It means writing the first and last lines before writing anything else. It means knowing the destination before you plot the route. It means accepting that some of your best lines might not serve the circle and therefore need to be cut or relocated.
This discipline has made my writing slower and my performances better. I spend more time with a notebook and less time with a deck of cards in the early stages of building a new piece. But when I finally pick up the cards — or the envelopes, or the pad, or whatever props the routine requires — the structure is already there. The words are already doing work. The circle is already closing.
I cannot build a routine without it now. The old way — where the opening was whatever I thought of first and the closing was wherever I ran out of things to say — feels like building a house without a foundation. It might stand. It will not endure.
The Last Line I Will Write Tonight
I am sitting in a hotel room in Vienna. It is late. Tomorrow morning I have a keynote for a tech company, and I am reviewing my material one final time. The routine I will close with has a circular structure that took me three weeks to get right. The first line of the routine is a question. The last line is the same question, asked again, but this time the audience knows the answer. And the answer has changed.
That is what circular structure does. It takes the audience on a journey and brings them home. But home looks different when you have been somewhere.