There was a line in one of my early mentalism routines that I could never land cleanly. The wording was something like “What I’m about to demonstrate is an experiment in how decisions are influenced by unconscious cognitive patterns that operate below the threshold of awareness.” I had written it during a late night in a hotel room in Innsbruck, and on paper it looked magnificent. It was precise. It was intelligent. It sounded exactly like the kind of thing a strategy consultant turned mentalist should say.
The problem was that every time I tried to deliver it in front of an actual human being, I stumbled. Not always on the same word. Sometimes “unconscious” tripped me up. Sometimes “threshold” came out awkward. Sometimes I would get halfway through and just… lose the thread entirely, trailing off into a paraphrase that never had the punch I intended.
I practiced it hundreds of times. In hotel rooms across Austria. In front of bathroom mirrors. On late-night walks through Graz, mumbling to myself like a man with concerns. I told myself the problem was memorization. I told myself I needed more repetitions. I told myself I was not practicing hard enough.
I was wrong about all of it.
The Stumble Test
Cara Hamilton articulates a principle in her guide on storytelling for magicians that I wish I had encountered years earlier: if when practicing aloud you stumble at a particular part of your script and continue to find it difficult, there is an error at that point. The problem is not your delivery. The problem is the writing.
This is a deceptively simple idea with enormous implications. Most performers — and I was firmly in this camp — assume that when they struggle with a line, the solution is more practice. More repetition. More discipline. The line is fine; the performer is the weak link. But Hamilton’s insight flips this entirely. The performer’s mouth and brain are giving feedback. A persistent stumble is not a failure of memory — it is a diagnostic signal from your body that something in the script does not work for spoken delivery.
The written word and the spoken word are different languages that happen to share a vocabulary. A sentence that reads beautifully on a page can be physically uncomfortable to say. Clusters of hard consonants. Awkward rhythmic patterns. Phrases that require you to breathe in the wrong place. Words that sound fine in isolation but become a mouthful when strung together in the particular sequence your script demands.
My “unconscious cognitive patterns below the threshold of awareness” line was a perfect example. It was excellent writing. It was terrible speech. The density of polysyllabic words created a rhythm that fought against natural spoken cadence. The abstract concepts stacked on top of each other with no concrete image to anchor them. And the sentence was too long for a single breath at performance pace, which meant I was always running out of air somewhere in the middle and either rushing the end or taking an unplanned breath that broke the flow.
Why Good Writing Can Be Bad Speech
This distinction between written and spoken language is something that nobody explicitly taught me, even though it seems obvious in retrospect. As a consultant, I write constantly — reports, proposals, presentations, strategy documents. My professional writing tends toward precision and formality. These are virtues on a page. They are liabilities on a stage.
Written language can accommodate complexity because the reader controls the pace. They can slow down, re-read, pause to absorb. Spoken language cannot accommodate complexity in the same way because the listener has no control over the pace. If they miss a word, it is gone. If a sentence is too dense, it overloads processing before the next sentence arrives. The performer’s job is to deliver information at a rate and in a form that the listener can absorb in real time, with no option to rewind.
This means spoken scripts need shorter sentences. More concrete language. More pauses. More repetition of key ideas. More conversational rhythm. Less formal structure. Fewer multi-syllable abstract nouns stacked in sequence. Everything that makes academic writing impressive makes spoken performance labored.
Pete McCabe makes a related point about scripting for magic: the spoken word is much shorter than the written word, and you should strip every unnecessary word to make the point happen faster. When I finally applied this principle to my stumble-prone line, I rewrote it as: “What you’re about to see is an experiment. I want to find out if our choices are as free as we think they are.” Two short sentences instead of one long one. Concrete instead of abstract. Conversational instead of formal. And I never stumbled on it again.
The Diagnostic Process
Once I understood the stumble test, I developed a process for applying it systematically to every script I write. The process is straightforward, but it requires honesty — specifically, the honesty to admit that the problem might be the writing rather than the performer.
Step one: record yourself performing the script. I use the voice memo function on my phone. This is not a polished recording — it is a diagnostic tool. Perform the script at full performance energy, as if an audience is present. Do not slow down to get the words right. Perform at the pace you would actually use.
Step two: note every stumble. Every hesitation. Every word that comes out slightly wrong. Every place where you have to restart a phrase. Every moment where your natural rhythm fights the rhythm of the sentence. Mark them.
Step three: look at the marked passages and ask a single question: is this a memorization problem or a writing problem? If you have practiced the passage extensively and still stumble, it is almost certainly a writing problem. If you just learned it yesterday, give yourself more time before diagnosing.
Step four: rewrite the problem passages. Not minor tweaks — genuine rewrites. Change the sentence structure. Use different words. Shorten. Simplify. Find the version that your mouth wants to say rather than the version your brain wants to write.
Step five: test the rewrite. Perform it again. Record it again. See if the stumble has moved, disappeared, or been replaced by a new one. Sometimes a rewrite solves one problem and creates another, and you need another pass.
This process sounds tedious. It is. But it is far less tedious than practicing a fundamentally flawed script for months and never understanding why it will not stick.
The Contraction Rule
One of the simplest and most effective changes I have made to my scripting process is using contractions. In written English — particularly formal written English — we tend to avoid contractions. “I would” not “I’d.” “They are” not “they’re.” “It is” not “it’s.” This feels more precise, more professional.
But nobody talks that way. Not in conversation, not in natural speech. When you say “I would like you to think of a number” on stage, there is a subtle but detectable artificiality. When you say “I’d like you to think of a number,” it sounds like something a real person would say in a real conversation. The difference is small on paper and significant in delivery.
I went through my entire working repertoire and replaced every uncontracted phrase with its contracted equivalent. “We would” became “we’d.” “They will” became “they’ll.” “I have” became “I’ve.” The cumulative effect was remarkable. Scripts that had felt stiff and rehearsed suddenly sounded natural. Lines that I had struggled to deliver smoothly became effortless, because my mouth was no longer fighting the artificial formality of the language.
Punctuation as Stage Direction
Another principle that transformed my scripting was thinking of punctuation not as grammar but as performance instruction. A comma is a brief pause — a beat, a moment to breathe. A period is a full stop — a longer pause, a moment of completion. A new paragraph is where you take a breath and shift direction.
This reframing changed how I write scripts. I stopped organizing my patter in neat, grammatically correct paragraphs and started organizing it in performance units — phrases and sentences grouped by how they are delivered rather than by how they read. A script that looks unusual on the page — short fragments, lots of white space, sentences that start on new lines — often sounds perfect in performance because the visual structure mirrors the spoken rhythm.
I keep two versions of every script: the performance version and the archive version. The archive version is a readable document that records the content. The performance version is formatted as a delivery guide, with spacing and line breaks that reflect actual pauses, breaths, and emphasis points. The performance version is what I rehearse with.
When the Stumble Is Not in the Words
Sometimes I apply the stumble test and discover that the problem is not a specific word or phrase — it is the structure of the entire passage. The ideas are in the wrong order, or the logical flow does not match the emotional flow, or a transition between ideas is missing.
This is harder to fix because it requires rethinking the passage rather than just rewriting it. But the diagnostic signal is the same: if you keep getting lost in a section, the section has a structural problem. Your brain cannot navigate it smoothly because the path is not clear.
I find this often happens at transitions — the moments between one phase of an effect and another. The script for the setup phase might be solid, and the script for the climax might be solid, but the bridge between them is muddy or unclear. This is where I stumble, because the transition demands a mental gear-shift that the script has not prepared me for.
The fix is usually to make the transition explicit. Add a sentence that bridges the two phases. Give yourself a landmark — a specific line that tells your brain “we have left phase one and are now entering phase two.” Transitions that work well feel like stepping stones across a stream. Each one is solid and clearly placed, and you can move from one to the next without thinking about where to put your feet.
Respecting What Your Mouth Tells You
There is a deeper lesson here that extends beyond scripting. The stumble test is really a lesson in listening to yourself — not in the metaphorical self-help sense, but in the literal, physical sense. Your body gives you feedback about your performance constantly. Your mouth stumbles on words it does not want to say. Your hands tense up during moments that feel unnatural. Your posture shifts when you are uncomfortable with a section of your act.
Most of us — and I am very much included in this — override that feedback. We assume the script is right and we are wrong. We practice harder, push through, try to force our bodies into compliance with a plan that our bodies are telling us does not work.
The stumble test teaches you to reverse that assumption. If your body keeps resisting a particular passage, maybe your body is right. Maybe the passage needs to change. Maybe the performance should adapt to the performer, rather than the other way around.
I now treat persistent stumbles as gifts. Each one is a marker that says “something here needs attention.” Not more practice — more thought. More rewriting. More willingness to let go of a line I love on the page but cannot deliver on the stage.
The Script Serves the Performance
A script is not literature. It is not meant to be read. It is meant to be spoken, heard, and experienced in real time by people who will never see the words on the page. The only test that matters is whether it works in the air between a performer and an audience. If it stumbles in that space, it does not matter how elegant it looks in a notebook.
Write your scripts. Then speak them. Then listen to where your mouth resists. Those resistance points are not failures of practice. They are the script telling you where it needs surgery. Respect the message. Make the cut. Rewrite until your words flow from you like conversation — natural, effortless, and entirely your own.
Your mouth knows things your brain does not. Learn to listen to it.