There is a sentence in John Graham’s Stage By Stage that stopped me cold when I first read it. Not because it was poetic or dramatic or beautifully phrased. It stopped me because it pointed out something so obvious that I could not believe I had never thought of it.
The idea, paraphrased, is this: do not think only in terms of exchanging something prepared for something ordinary. You can also exchange something ordinary for something prepared.
I read that sentence in a hotel room in Innsbruck, sitting at the small desk with the book propped open against my laptop, and I had to set it down and stare at the wall for a full minute while my brain rearranged itself.
I had been thinking about prop management in one direction my entire time in magic. Just one direction. And that one-directional thinking had been limiting me in ways I could not see until someone pointed out that the road runs both ways.
The One-Directional Assumption
Let me describe the assumption I had been carrying around without ever examining it.
When I thought about prop management in my show — about the logistics of what goes where and when — I always thought in terms of cleanup. Something is in a particular state during the effect. After the effect, it needs to be returned to a different state so that if anyone were to examine it, everything would appear completely ordinary. The flow was always from special to ordinary. From prepared to clean. From performance state to examination state.
This is, of course, a legitimate and important concern. You want your props to appear as ordinary as possible, and one way to achieve that is to ensure that at the appropriate moments, they genuinely are ordinary. No disputes. No questions. No doubts. This is good practice, and I am not suggesting anyone abandon it.
But I had made the mistake of assuming that this was the only direction the exchange could flow. That the purpose of prop management was exclusively about cleaning up after an effect. That the traffic was one-way.
It never occurred to me that you could go the other direction.
The Reverse Direction
Think about what happens when you reverse the flow. Instead of starting with something in a prepared state and ending with it in an ordinary state, you start with something genuinely ordinary and, at some point during your show, exchange it for something in a prepared state.
The implications are profound, and they opened up a category of creative thinking that I had been completely blind to.
If an object begins its life in your show as genuinely ordinary — and the audience sees it, handles it, or otherwise experiences it as ordinary — then it has been, in their minds, established as legitimate. It is what it appears to be. Their mental model of that object is locked in: ordinary, normal, nothing special.
Now, at some point later in the show, during a natural transition, that ordinary object can be exchanged for one that has been prepared. The audience has no reason to question it. They already know what that object is. They already accepted it. Their mental model is set. They are not going to re-examine an assumption that was formed minutes or even many effects ago.
This is not about deception in the crude sense. It is about creative architecture. It is about designing your show so that the flow of objects through your performance serves your creative goals in ways that a one-directional model simply cannot achieve.
Why I Had Never Thought of This
I spent a long time trying to understand why this reverse direction had never occurred to me, and I think the answer is rooted in how most of us learn magic.
When you learn individual effects — which is how every magician starts — you learn them as self-contained units. Each effect has its own setup, its own performance, and its own cleanup. You learn to manage props within the boundaries of a single routine. The thinking is always: here is where it starts, here is the performance, here is where it ends, and here is what you do to clean up so that you can move on.
This is fine when you are performing individual effects. But when you start building a show — a continuous, flowing experience with multiple effects connected by transitions — the self-contained model becomes a cage. You are thinking about each effect in isolation, managing props within the boundaries of each piece, and missing the enormous opportunities that come from thinking about prop management across the entire show.
Graham’s insight was a show-level insight, not an effect-level insight. He was not thinking about how to manage props within a single routine. He was thinking about how objects flow through an entire performance. And when you think at the show level, the reverse direction becomes not just possible but obvious. Of course objects can change state in either direction. Of course the flow does not have to be one-way. Of course you can use the early part of your show to establish something as ordinary and the later part of your show to leverage that established normalcy.
I had been thinking like a trick performer. Graham taught me to think like a show designer.
The Creative Possibilities
Once I started thinking bidirectionally about prop management, I saw new creative possibilities everywhere. I am not going to describe specific applications — that would cross lines I have committed never to cross in this blog — but I can describe the general categories of creative thinking that this reversal opened up.
First, it solved problems that I had been struggling with for months. There were effects in my show that I wanted to perform but could not figure out how to set up naturally. The preparation felt artificial, forced, or logistically awkward. When I reversed my thinking and realized that the object could begin the show in its ordinary state and be exchanged later, several of those problems evaporated. The setup that felt impossible within the boundaries of a single effect became trivial within the flow of the show.
Second, it created opportunities for stronger moments. When an audience has already accepted an object as ordinary — when they have seen it, interacted with it, and formed a mental model of what it is — and then that object later does something impossible, the impossibility feels stronger. The audience is not wondering about the object. They are not thinking about whether it might be special. They already know it is ordinary. They saw it. They are sure. And that certainty makes the impossible moment land harder.
Third, it simplified my show in ways I did not expect. Some of the most convoluted aspects of my show — the moments that required the most careful choreography and the most precise timing — existed because I was trying to manage objects in one direction only. When I allowed the traffic to flow both ways, some of those convoluted sequences collapsed into simple, natural actions that required almost no careful management at all. The show became easier to perform because it was designed more intelligently.
The Lesson Beyond Props
There is a broader lesson here that extends beyond prop management, and it is about the assumptions we carry without examining them.
I had an assumption — exchange always goes from prepared to clean — that I never questioned. It was not a rule I had been taught explicitly. It was a pattern I had absorbed from learning individual effects, a default way of thinking that I had internalized so deeply that it felt like a law of nature. Prepared things become clean. That is just how it works.
Except it is not how it works. It is how I had always thought about it, which is a very different thing.
How many other one-directional assumptions am I carrying? How many creative possibilities am I missing because I have locked myself into a pattern that I absorbed unconsciously and never bothered to examine?
This question haunts me now, and in a good way. Every time I sit down to work on my show, I try to identify the assumptions I am making and ask myself: what if the opposite were also true? What if this works in both directions? What if the constraint I am struggling with is not actually a constraint but an unexamined habit of thought?
More often than I would like to admit, the answer is that the constraint is imaginary. The road really does run both ways. I just never looked over my shoulder.
Applying Bidirectional Thinking to Show Design
The practical application of this principle is straightforward, even if the mental shift required is significant.
When you are designing your show, do not think about each effect as an isolated unit with its own setup and cleanup. Think about the entire show as a single flowing system through which objects move, change state, and serve multiple purposes. Think about the journey of each object from the moment it first appears to the moment it last appears, and consider all the possible states it could pass through along that journey.
Some objects will naturally flow from prepared to clean. That is fine. That is often the right direction.
But some objects might benefit from flowing the other direction — from clean to prepared. And the only way to discover those opportunities is to allow yourself to think bidirectionally. To release the one-directional assumption and consider both possibilities.
This is not complicated. It is just different from how most of us were taught to think. And the difference, once you see it, opens doors that you did not know existed.
The Hotel Room Revelation
I remember the evening in Innsbruck when I first applied this reversed thinking to my own show. I was sitting on the hotel bed with a notebook, mapping out the flow of objects through my thirty-minute set. I had drawn a timeline across the page, with each effect marked, and I was tracing the journey of every prop from its first appearance to its last.
When I allowed myself to draw arrows in both directions — not just from left to right, from prepared to clean, but also from right to left, from clean to prepared — the diagram changed completely. Knots untangled. Problems that I had been working around for months suddenly had simple, elegant solutions. And new possibilities appeared that I had never considered because I had never allowed myself to look in that direction.
I sat there for over an hour, scribbling and revising and occasionally swearing under my breath as another obvious solution presented itself. By the time I put the notebook down, my show had three fewer logistical problems and two new creative opportunities that had not existed an hour earlier.
All because I read one sentence that told me the road runs both ways.
That is the thing about assumptions. They are invisible until someone makes them visible. And when they become visible, they lose their power to constrain you. You realize that you were operating within boundaries that you drew yourself, that you could have erased at any time, that you simply never thought to question.
The exchange does not have to go in only one direction. It can go either way. And the direction you choose — or the combination of directions you design into your show — is a creative decision, not a physical law.
Once I understood that, my show got better. Not because I learned a new technique. Because I stopped thinking a constraint was a rule.