Franz Kafka woke up one morning and wrote: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” He did not start with the biology of transformation. He did not research entomology. He did not build a logical mechanism for how a man becomes a bug. He started with a feeling — the suffocating dread of waking up and being something other than yourself — and he made that feeling literal.
Derren Brown references Kafka in Absolute Magic when making a point about how magic should be created. The comparison is sharp and, once I understood it, impossible to forget. Kafka began with an emotional reality and then realized it as a physical metaphor. The strongest magic, Brown argues, should be designed exactly the same way.
For the first two years of my journey into magic, I did the opposite. Every single effect I designed started with a method. I would learn a new technique, or acquire a new prop, or discover a new principle, and then I would build an effect around it. The method came first. The feeling, if it arrived at all, was an afterthought.
This is how most of us start. And it is exactly backwards.
The Method-First Trap
The method-first approach is seductive because it feels productive. You have a tool, and you look for a problem it can solve. You learn a new technique and immediately start thinking about what trick you can build around it. The technique is concrete, tangible, something you can practice. A feeling is abstract, slippery, hard to pin down.
But the problem with starting from the method is that the method constrains the imagination. When you begin with what you can do, you end up designing effects that showcase your capability rather than effects that create an emotional experience. The trick becomes a demonstration of your skill set rather than a moment of genuine impossibility.
I noticed this pattern in my own work when I started performing at corporate events. I had a collection of effects that were technically solid and visually impressive. But after shows, the comments I received were variations on the same theme: “You’re really good with cards” or “How do you do that?” The audience appreciated the skill. They were puzzled by the method. But they were not moved. They were not transported. They went home with a puzzle, not a feeling.
Joshua Jay puts it perfectly when he describes the difference between seamlessness and context. My effects had seamlessness — the techniques were smooth, the methods were well-hidden. But they lacked context. They existed because I could do them, not because they meant something.
Starting with the Image
The shift happened for me on a train between Vienna and Graz. I was not thinking about magic. I was staring out the window, watching the Austrian countryside roll past, and I was thinking about a conversation I had had with a friend about memory — specifically, about how certain memories become more vivid over time while others fade entirely. The same event, experienced by two people, becomes two completely different memories within a year. Reality is plastic.
And then a visual image appeared in my mind, fully formed: a photograph that changes in someone’s hands. Not a card trick. Not a reveal. A photograph that shows one thing and then, after being held for a moment while the person thinks about the memory it represents, shows something different. As if the memory itself had shifted.
I did not have a method. I had no idea how to make this work. All I had was a feeling — the eeriness of memory’s unreliability — and an image that captured that feeling. For the first time in my creative process, I was starting where Kafka started: with the emotional reality, letting the physical realization come later.
It took me months to find a way to create something that captured even a fraction of that original image. The final version is quite different from what I first envisioned. But it retained the feeling. When I perform it, the spectator’s response is not “how did you do that?” It is a pause, a strange look, a quiet “that’s unsettling.” They feel something. The method serves the feeling, not the other way around.
The “What If” Question
Jay describes his creative process as beginning with the question “What if?” What if a phone could float? What if a card could travel through solid glass? What if someone’s thought could appear written in a sealed envelope that has been in full view the entire time?
The “what if” question is powerful because it bypasses the method entirely. You are not asking “what can I do?” You are asking “what would be amazing?” The first question limits you to your current toolkit. The second question has no limits at all.
But I think there is an even more powerful starting point than “what if?” — and that is “what does it feel like?” Not “what would it look like if a card changed?” but “what does it feel like when something you were certain of suddenly becomes uncertain?” Not “what would it look like if I could read someone’s mind?” but “what does it feel like to be truly known by a stranger?”
The feeling comes before the effect. The effect comes before the method. This is the Kafka Principle: start with the emotional reality, make it literal, and figure out the mechanics last.
Why Consultants Make This Mistake
I have a theory about why the method-first approach is especially tempting for people like me — analytical types who came to magic from fields where problem-solving is the core skill.
In strategy consulting, you start with tools and frameworks. You have SWOT analyses, Porter’s Five Forces, scenario planning models. You apply these tools to a client’s situation, and the analysis produces insights. The tool comes first, the insight follows. It is method-first thinking, and in consulting, it works well.
But magic is not consulting. Magic is not about solving a problem. It is about creating an experience. And experiences do not emerge from applying tools to situations. They emerge from feelings, images, and the desire to share something that matters to you.
The hardest lesson for me was learning to sit with a feeling without immediately reaching for the toolbox. To let the image marinate. To ask “what does this make me feel?” before asking “how could I make this happen?” It goes against every instinct I developed in two decades of analytical work. But it produces effects that are categorically different from anything the method-first approach generates.
Metaphor as Magic’s Native Language
Jay makes the observation that all magic is metaphor. Houdini escaping a straitjacket was not really about a man getting out of a restraint. It was about an immigrant who could not be constrained — about the refusal to be held down by any force, any system, any limitation. The escape was the metaphor made literal.
This changed how I think about every effect in my repertoire. A card that rises to the top of the deck is not just a card trick. It is a metaphor for something — persistence, inevitability, the idea that certain things cannot be suppressed no matter how hard you try. A thought that appears in a sealed envelope is not just a prediction. It is a metaphor for connection, for the idea that certain knowledge transcends the barriers we put between ourselves and others.
When you start with the metaphor, the effect designs itself. The question shifts from “what trick should I do?” to “what human experience do I want to make visible?” And once you know the experience, you can search for the effect that embodies it most purely.
Some of my best-received pieces came from this process. I would identify a feeling or a human truth that mattered to me, think about what it would look like if that feeling were made physical and visible, and then — only then — start working on how to create that visual reality.
The Feeling Notebook
I keep a notebook specifically for this purpose. It is not a trick notebook. It does not contain methods or techniques or prop lists. It contains feelings, images, metaphors, and fragments of experience that seem like they could become magic.
An entry might read: “The feeling of recognizing someone you are certain you have never met.” Or: “What if an object could carry the emotional weight of the person who last held it?” Or: “The moment between a question being asked and the answer being given — the space where anything is still possible.”
Most of these entries never become effects. Some of them sit in the notebook for months before a possible realization occurs to me. A few of them have become pieces I perform regularly. The notebook is not a production pipeline. It is a garden where ideas germinate on their own schedule.
This is the opposite of the magic dealer’s catalog, where effects come pre-packaged with methods and sometimes even scripts. The catalog approach is method-first by definition: here is a thing you can do, now go find a reason to do it. The feeling notebook is feeling-first: here is something that matters, now find a way to make it real.
The Patience Problem
The biggest challenge of the Kafka Principle is patience. Starting with a feeling means you may not have a performable effect for weeks or months. You are sitting with an emotional image, waiting for the physical realization to emerge. Meanwhile, the method-first approach is right there, ready to produce results immediately. New technique? New trick. New prop? New routine. Instant gratification.
But the effects that come from patience are different in kind, not just degree. They have a coherence that method-first effects lack. The feeling, the image, the metaphor, the method, the performance — they all align. Nothing feels bolted on. Nothing feels like it was added because you happened to know how to do it.
Audiences sense this alignment even if they cannot articulate it. They do not say “this effect has a coherent design philosophy.” They say “that was different” or “I’ve never felt that before” or simply go quiet in a way that tells you the experience went deeper than puzzlement.
Kafka Did Not Explain the Bug
One more thing about Kafka. He never explains how Gregor becomes an insect. He never provides a mechanism. He never justifies the transformation with science or mythology or fantasy logic. It simply happens, and the story is about what it feels like to live with that reality.
This is the final lesson of the Kafka Principle for magic. You do not need to explain the cause. You do not need to provide a narrative mechanism for why the impossible thing happens. What you need is for the audience to feel the emotional truth of it. If the feeling is right — if the metaphor lands, if the experience resonates — the question of how becomes secondary.
The audience does not need to understand the mechanism. They need to feel the transformation.
Start with the feeling. Let the feeling suggest the image. Let the image suggest the effect. Let the effect — only at the very end, when everything else is in place — suggest the method.
This is not how I learned to create magic. But it is how I create it now. And the difference shows every single time I walk onto a stage.