In my consulting work, I use frameworks constantly. Strategy frameworks, innovation frameworks, decision-making frameworks. These are, in essence, maps. They take the overwhelming complexity of a business situation and reduce it to a navigable structure. You do not need to understand every detail of the terrain if you have a map that shows you the important features and the paths between them.
I never thought to apply this concept to magic performance until I encountered an idea from Jumana Moon — a professional storyteller whose framework appears in Cara Hamilton’s guide on storytelling for magicians. Moon describes stories as maps. Sometimes literal maps, she explains, for navigating physical landscapes. Sometimes metaphorical maps, for navigating the significant passages of a life: coming of age, falling in love, confronting loss, finding wisdom.
That framing hit me with the force of something I had always known but never articulated. Stories are not decoration. Stories are navigation tools. And if that is true, then the story in a magic performance is not an add-on. It is the thing that tells the audience where they are, where they are going, and why the journey matters.
The Consultant’s Map Problem
My background in strategy consulting gave me a particular relationship with frameworks. I trust them. I rely on them. I understand that a good framework does not capture every detail of reality — it captures the details that matter for the decision at hand. It simplifies without distorting.
When I started building magic routines, I unconsciously treated the trick itself as the framework. The method was the map. The sequence of moves, the phases of the effect, the procedure — these were the structure I navigated during performance. My attention was on executing the method correctly, hitting each milestone in the right order, arriving at the climax on schedule.
The audience, of course, could not see my map. They did not know the method. They did not know the milestones. They were in the dark, watching a performer do things they did not understand, with no framework for making sense of the experience.
I was navigating. They were lost.
This is such an obvious problem in retrospect that it embarrasses me to describe it. But I suspect it is extremely common. Performers build routines that make perfect sense from the inside — from the perspective of someone who knows the method, the sequence, the secret architecture — and then present them to audiences who have none of that context. Without a story to serve as a map, the audience has to construct their own framework for the experience. And the framework they construct is usually: “I am trying to figure out how this is done.”
That is the wrong journey. That is the audience navigating with the wrong map. And it is the performer’s fault for not providing a better one.
The Story As the Audience’s Map
When Moon describes stories as maps, she is pointing to something ancient. Before written language, before cartography, before GPS, stories were how cultures encoded navigational knowledge. The hero travels from the village, through the forest, past the river, to the mountain. The journey is a story. The story is a map.
In magical performance, the story serves the same function. It tells the audience where they are in the experience and what kind of terrain they are crossing. “We are about to explore what happens when free will meets fate” is a map. It tells the audience: this journey is about choice and destiny. Whatever happens next, interpret it through that lens. The audience has a framework. They are not lost. They are navigating with you rather than scrambling to figure out the route on their own.
Without that story-map, the audience defaults to the only framework available to them: puzzle-solving. How did they do that? What is the trick? Where was the switch? This is a natural and understandable response to an unexplained experience. The audience is trying to make sense of what they see, and without a narrative framework, the only sense-making tool they have is analysis.
A story replaces analysis with experience. When the audience knows the journey is about coincidence, or memory, or the unreliability of perception, they stop analyzing the method and start inhabiting the theme. They are no longer solving. They are traveling.
Mapping My First Routine
The first routine where I deliberately used story as a map was a piece about decisions. It was for a corporate keynote, which made the theme natural — my audience was full of executives who made high-stakes decisions daily. The effect involved a series of choices made by audience members that converged on a single, seemingly impossible outcome.
Before I applied the map concept, this routine was a demonstration. I would walk the audience through the choices, reveal the convergence, and accept the applause. It was impressive but forgettable. The audience had no map. They experienced a series of moments that built to a surprise, but they had no framework for what the surprise meant.
After I applied the map concept, I opened the routine with a story about a decision I had made early in my consulting career — a left-or-right choice at a crossroads in a project that, looking back, determined the trajectory of the next three years. I did not tell the audience what the routine was about. I told them what the story was about. And the story was about how small decisions create large consequences in ways we cannot predict.
With that map in hand, the audience interpreted every choice in the routine through the lens of the story. Each audience member’s selection was not just a trick procedure — it was a small decision with unknown consequences. The convergence at the end was not just impressive — it was meaningful. It illustrated the theme. It proved the story.
The applause was the same. The conversations afterward were different. People talked about the theme, not the method. They talked about decisions they had made, about crossroads in their own careers. The story-map had given them a way to connect the performance to their own lives. The trick was the vehicle. The map was what made the journey matter.
The Coming-of-Age Map
Moon’s framework identifies several types of maps that stories provide. Physical maps for navigating landscapes. But also maps for the significant passages of human life: coming of age, love, marriage, death, transformation. These are universal experiences, and stories about them resonate across cultures because everyone has either been through them or will go through them.
I find this concept particularly useful because of my own background. I came to magic as an adult, which means my magic journey itself is a kind of coming-of-age story — but one that happened decades after the typical age for such a narrative. That unusual timing makes for a compelling map. When I tell an audience about buying my first deck of cards from ellusionist.com because I could not bring my guitar on business trips, I am providing a map for a specific kind of journey: the discovery of a passion later in life, the vulnerability of starting something new as an accomplished adult, the humility of being terrible at something when you are used to being competent.
That map connects with audiences because many of them have experienced — or want to experience — the same thing. The executive who took up painting at fifty. The lawyer who started playing piano at forty. The engineer who enrolled in a creative writing class. These are all coming-of-age stories displaced in time, and they all carry the same emotional terrain: excitement, fear, inadequacy, persistence, breakthrough.
When I frame a routine through this map, the audience is not watching a magic trick. They are watching someone navigate a journey they recognize. The magic becomes an illustration of the journey’s rewards — the impossible things that become possible when you commit to learning something new.
The Old Maps Were the Best Maps
Moon makes a point about folklore that has stayed with me: old tales survive because the situations humans face remain the same even though settings change. The specific details of a medieval folktale — the castle, the dragon, the enchanted forest — are dated. But the underlying map is eternal: someone faces an obstacle, makes a choice, suffers consequences, finds wisdom.
I have started looking at classic magic effects through this lens. The cups and balls — one of the oldest effects in recorded history, depicted on the walls of an Egyptian tomb at Beni Hassan around 1900 BC — is not just a trick. It is a story about appearance and reality, about how confidently we track what we see and how easily that confidence can be misplaced. That story is as relevant now as it was nearly four thousand years ago.
The ambitious card — where a chosen card repeatedly rises to the top of the deck no matter where it is placed — is a story about persistence. About something that cannot be suppressed. About the irrepressible nature of certain truths.
These are old maps. And they are good maps. They survived because they navigate terrain that every human recognizes.
Building My Own Atlas
Over the past year, I have been building what I think of as an atlas — a collection of story-maps that I can match to different routines and different audiences. Some maps are corporate: stories about decisions, innovation, assumptions, the cost of certainty. Some maps are personal: stories about learning, vulnerability, the comedy of incompetence, the stubborn joy of practice. Some maps are universal: stories about perception, memory, coincidence, the thin line between the possible and the impossible.
Each map serves a different terrain. A keynote for tech executives requires a different map than an after-dinner performance at a private gathering. The map must match both the audience and the effect. A routine about mental influence requires a map about the nature of choice. A routine about prediction requires a map about the relationship between past and future. A routine about transformation requires a map about change.
The matching process is part of the creative work now. When I acquire or develop a new effect, the first question is not “what do I say while I do this?” The first question is “what map does this effect need?” What terrain does it navigate? What human experience does it illuminate? What journey will the audience take?
The Navigator’s Responsibility
If stories are maps, then the performer is a navigator. And the navigator’s first responsibility is to the people making the journey. Not to the vehicle. Not to the route. To the travelers.
This means the story must serve the audience, not the performer’s ego. It means the map must be clear enough to follow without being so detailed that it robs the journey of discovery. It means the performer must know the terrain intimately — must have walked it many times in rehearsal, must know every landmark and every potential wrong turn — so that the audience can walk it for the first time with confidence.
I came to magic through strategy consulting, a field obsessed with frameworks and maps. I thought I was leaving that world behind when I picked up a deck of cards. I was not. I was entering a world that needed maps just as badly, and that rewarded good navigation just as generously.
Every performance needs a map. The story is that map. And the best stories — the ones that have survived thousands of years of telling and retelling — are maps to places every human needs to go.