I was sitting in a hotel room in Linz, laptop open on the desk, a deck of cards spread across the duvet, trying to write a script for a routine I planned to use in an upcoming corporate keynote. The routine was solid. I had rehearsed it thoroughly. The reactions when I practiced it were good. But when I tried to write down what I actually said during the performance — the words, in order, that came out of my mouth — I discovered something deeply uncomfortable.
Half of what I said made no sense.
Not in the way that a bad joke makes no sense, or that a confusing sentence makes no sense. It made no sense in the way that a stranger giving you arbitrary instructions makes no sense. “Cut the deck anywhere you like. Good. Now place the top half here. Take the bottom half and shuffle it. Now deal five cards face down.” Each instruction was clear. Each instruction was necessary for the routine to work. And not a single instruction had a reason.
Why should the audience member cut the deck? Why there? Why five cards? Why face down? From my side of the equation, the answers were obvious — each step was required by the method. But from the audience’s perspective, they were simply following arbitrary commands issued by a man who had not bothered to explain why any of this mattered.
This was the problem. And I had been ignoring it for months.
The Chapter That Rewired My Thinking
I found the language for what I was doing wrong in Pete McCabe’s Scripting Magic 2, specifically in his section on what he calls the hierarchy of scripting as method. McCabe describes four levels at which your script can function relative to the method of the trick. The first level — the foundation, the entry point, the minimum standard that every performer should meet — is justifying procedure.
The concept is straightforward: every magic routine has procedural requirements imposed by the method. The audience must do certain things in a certain order for the effect to work. At Level One, your script provides logical, believable reasons for each of those procedural steps. Instead of arbitrary instructions, the audience hears a coherent rationale for why things must be done this specific way.
When I read this, I felt the particular embarrassment of encountering an obvious truth that I had somehow failed to see. Of course the instructions should make sense. Of course the audience should understand why they are doing what they are doing. Of course unexplained commands from a stranger on stage feel strange and create the exact kind of suspicion that undermines magic.
And yet I had been performing for months — in hotel lobbies, at corporate events, during keynote shows across Austria — without once asking myself whether my procedural instructions sounded reasonable to anyone other than me.
The Audit
That night in Linz, I went through every routine in my working set. All six pieces. For each one, I wrote down every procedural instruction I gave to the audience or a volunteer. Then I put on my strategy consultant hat — the hat I wear in my actual career, the one that involves questioning every assumption and stress-testing every process — and I asked: does this instruction make sense to someone who does not know the method?
The results were not encouraging.
In one routine, I asked a volunteer to hold their hand flat, palm up. There was no reason given. I just told them to do it and they did, because people on stage tend to follow instructions. But the instruction was arbitrary. Why palm up? Why flat? To someone analyzing the experience afterward — and audiences do analyze, more than we like to admit — the instruction was a red flag. It said: the performer needs your hand in this specific position for the trick to work. Which is exactly what I did not want them thinking.
In another piece, I asked someone to name a number between one and ten. Fine. But I said it like a command, not like a conversational request. There was no context for why a number mattered, no framing that made the choice feel meaningful. It was a procedural requirement delivered as a procedural requirement, and the only reason the audience accepted it was that they were being polite.
Politeness, I realized, is not the same as believability. The audience will follow your instructions because social convention demands it. That does not mean they believe your instructions are reasonable. It means they are cooperating despite finding them suspicious. And suspicion is the enemy of wonder.
Building the Reasons
McCabe’s examples in the book illustrate how elegantly this can be done. He describes Juan Tamariz turning the procedural requirements of a card trick into a running joke — highlighting the procedure rather than hiding it, using humor to make the conditions both entertaining and logically necessary within the world of the performance. The presentation becomes about the impossibility of the conditions, which means the audience is focused on how fair everything is rather than wondering why they are being asked to do strange things.
I started rebuilding my scripts from the procedure outward. For each instruction I gave, I asked: what reason can I give for this that is either logical, entertaining, or both?
The hand-flat-palm-up instruction became part of a brief explanation about energy and contact — not a mystical explanation, because that is not who I am, but a playful one delivered with a self-aware smile that invited the audience to play along. “I need your hand flat because — and I know how this sounds — I need to feel whether you are lying. I read palms the way my grandmother claimed she could, except she was from Vienna and her success rate was about forty percent.”
The instruction now had a reason. The reason was partly a joke. The audience laughed, accepted the instruction, and — crucially — stopped thinking about why the hand needed to be in that position. The procedural requirement was justified, the justification was entertaining, and the suspicious moment became a connecting moment.
For the number selection, I added a single sentence of context: “I want you to think of a number, any number between one and ten, because that is about as many decisions as I can keep track of simultaneously.” Self-deprecating, humanizing, and it provided a logical cap on the range without making the limitation seem arbitrary.
These are small changes. Individual sentences. A few words added here, a framing shift there. But the cumulative effect was transformative. The routines stopped feeling like procedures and started feeling like conversations. The audience stopped being directed and started being included.
What Justification Actually Does
When I think about why Level One scripting matters, the strategy consultant in me keeps returning to a concept from organizational psychology: resistance to arbitrary authority. People comply with instructions more willingly, more thoroughly, and with less skepticism when they understand why those instructions exist. This is as true on stage as it is in a boardroom.
An audience member who understands — or believes they understand — why they are shuffling the deck is a fundamentally different participant than one who is shuffling because they were told to. The first is engaged in the logic of the situation. The second is performing obedience. And performed obedience does not produce wonder. It produces the passive acceptance that magicians sometimes mistake for good audience management but that is actually the opposite of the emotional engagement we are trying to create.
McCabe makes a related point that stuck with me: magicians spend enormous effort making their methods physically invisible. Hours of practice to ensure a certain action cannot be seen. But if you make the action psychologically invisible — if you give the audience a compelling reason to believe that the action is a natural, logical part of the proceedings — that is often more effective and always more sustainable than physical concealment alone.
This is not about lying. It is about storytelling. When you tell the audience that you need the deck cut to ensure fairness, or that the number they choose will determine something specific, or that the way they hold the card matters for a particular reason, you are creating a narrative framework that makes the procedure feel like a natural part of the story rather than an imposed requirement.
The Hotel Room Discovery
I spent three consecutive evenings in that hotel room in Linz rewriting my scripts. By the third evening, every procedural instruction in every routine had at least one justifying reason. Some reasons were logical. Some were humorous. Some were both. A few were deliberately absurd in a way that acknowledged the absurdity, which I found worked surprisingly well with corporate audiences who appreciate self-awareness.
The first performance with the rewritten scripts was at a technology conference in Graz. The difference was immediate. Not in the reactions to the magical moments — those were roughly the same, because the effects had not changed. The difference was in the texture of the space between the magical moments. The audience was more relaxed. The volunteers were less stiff. The laughter came easier. The engagement was deeper.
What had changed was that the audience was no longer being subjected to a series of unexplained commands. They were being guided through a narrative in which every step had a purpose — or at least appeared to. The experience felt collaborative rather than directive. And collaborative experiences produce richer emotional responses than directive ones.
The Minimum Standard
Here is what I want to be clear about: Level One is the minimum. It is the floor, not the ceiling. McCabe’s hierarchy goes higher — much higher — and we will explore those levels in the posts that follow. But the floor matters enormously, because most performers, myself included for an embarrassingly long time, do not even meet it.
If you perform any routine in which you give the audience instructions that have no apparent reason, you are asking them to cooperate on faith. Some will. Many will. But every instruction without a reason is a micro-moment of suspicion, a tiny crack in the wall of believability, a point at which the analytical mind of the spectator is invited to ask: why? And that question, once activated, does not easily deactivate.
The fix is often absurdly simple. A single sentence. A brief phrase. A reason that does not need to be true, only plausible. “I want you to hold it face down so neither of us can see it.” “I need exactly four cards because each one represents a suit.” “Shuffle it thoroughly — I want to make sure there is no way I could know the order.”
Each of these sentences takes two seconds to say. Each one replaces an arbitrary command with a motivated action. And each one moves the audience from passive compliance to active participation.
What This Changed for Me
I perform differently now. Not because the routines are different, or the methods are different, or the effects are different. The change is entirely in what I say. Every instruction has a reason. Every procedural step has a justification. Every moment where the method imposes a requirement on the audience is framed as a natural, logical, or entertaining part of the experience.
This is, in retrospect, so obvious that I am mildly embarrassed to be writing about it. But I have watched enough performances — my own and others’ — to know that the obvious thing is not the commonly done thing. Most performers, at most levels, give arbitrary instructions and rely on audience politeness to carry them through. It works. But it works in the way that a meal without seasoning works: it fills you up, but it does not satisfy.
The first level of scripting as method is seasoning. It is the most basic improvement you can make, and it costs nothing but a few minutes of thought and a willingness to look at your routines from the audience’s perspective instead of your own.
I learned it in a hotel room in Linz, at a desk that was too small, with a deck of cards that I had been performing with for months without ever asking myself the simplest question a strategy consultant should always ask: does this make sense to the person on the other side?
It did not. Now it does. And the difference is larger than a single sentence should be able to produce.