I made a mistake at a corporate event in Vienna that should have been a disaster. During a routine I had performed dozens of times, I fumbled a moment that I will not describe in detail — suffice to say that something that should have been invisible was, for a fraction of a second, not invisible. The kind of error that, when it happens in rehearsal, makes you stop and reset. The kind of error that, when it happens on stage, makes your stomach drop.
Except the audience did not notice.
Not a single person reacted. No eyes widened. No heads tilted. No one leaned forward with the dawning expression of someone who has caught a performer in the act. The moment passed and the routine continued and the climax landed with the same force it always does, and afterward, when I was replaying the performance in my head while driving home, I could not figure out why nobody had seen it.
Then I remembered what I had been saying at the exact moment the mistake happened. I had been in the middle of a story — a personal anecdote about a time I had misjudged an audience during a keynote in Salzburg. The story was funny. The audience was laughing. Their attention was not on my hands or the props or the physical actions of the routine. Their attention was on the story, on the image of me embarrassing myself in front of a room full of executives, on the punchline they could feel approaching.
They were not watching the method because they were listening to the script.
The Second Level
This experience, which I did not fully understand at the time, is an almost textbook example of what Pete McCabe calls Level Two of scripting as method. In Scripting Magic 2, McCabe describes a hierarchy of how your script can function relative to the secret workings of your routine. Level One, which I wrote about previously, is justification — giving the audience logical reasons for each procedural step. Level Two goes further: the script is so engaging, so interesting, so emotionally or intellectually absorbing, that the audience’s cognitive resources are entirely occupied by the content. They are not analyzing your hands because they are processing your story. They are not reconstructing the sequence of events because they are anticipating your punchline.
At Level Two, the script does not merely justify the procedure. It overwhelms the analytical impulse entirely by giving the audience something better to think about.
Eugene Burger once said something that McCabe references and that has stayed with me since I first encountered it: “Don’t talk so much, and slow down.” The context of Burger’s advice is about eliminating what he called non-moments — the dead air, the filler phrases, the nervous chatter that performers use to fill silence without adding value. At Level Two, every moment of the script is a moment. There is no filler. There is no dead air. Every sentence either advances the story, generates an emotion, or creates an expectation. The audience’s mind is always occupied with something worth occupying it.
The Performance That Should Not Have Worked
The Vienna event was not the first time I noticed the pattern, but it was the most vivid. Looking back over my performance notes — I keep a notebook where I record what worked and what did not after each show — I found a recurring theme that had been invisible to me because I did not have the conceptual framework to see it.
My best performances, the ones where the reactions were strongest and the audience connection was deepest, were not my most technically proficient shows. They were my most narratively compelling shows. The nights when my stories landed, when my humor connected, when I found the right anecdotes to bridge the magic to the audience’s world — those were the nights when the magic felt impossible, even when my execution was less than perfect.
Conversely, my most technically proficient performances — the nights when every movement was precise, every angle was perfect, every procedural moment was executed exactly as rehearsed — sometimes produced weaker reactions. Not bad reactions. But flatter ones. Polite applause rather than genuine astonishment. The audience appreciated the skill but was not transported by the experience.
This pattern confused me until I read McCabe’s framework. Then it made perfect sense. On the technically excellent nights, I was focused on execution. My attention was on my hands, my angles, my timing. And because my attention was there, the audience’s attention followed. They watched my hands because my behavior signaled that my hands were where the important thing was happening. They analyzed the procedure because my intensity communicated that the procedure was the main event.
On the narratively compelling nights, my attention was on the audience. I was telling stories, making eye contact, responding to their reactions, building the emotional arc of the piece. My hands were doing what they needed to do — years of hotel room practice had made the physical execution automatic enough that it could run in the background — but my attention, and therefore the audience’s attention, was elsewhere. It was on the human connection. On the story. On the meaning.
The audience was too busy feeling something to think about analyzing anything.
The Cognitive Budget
There is a concept from cognitive psychology that I encountered in my consulting work long before I started performing magic, and it maps perfectly onto McCabe’s Level Two. The concept is cognitive load — the idea that human attention and processing power are finite resources. When those resources are occupied with one task, fewer resources remain available for other tasks.
In the context of magic, this means that an audience member who is processing an engaging story, anticipating a punchline, empathizing with a narrative, or absorbing an emotionally resonant moment has fewer cognitive resources available for analytical reconstruction of the method. Their mental bandwidth is occupied. The analytical part of the brain that would normally be asking “How did he do that?” is busy doing something else.
This is not misdirection in the traditional sense of directing attention away from a secret action. This is a deeper form of misdirection — directing the audience’s entire mode of thinking away from analysis and toward experience. At Level Two, you are not hiding the method behind a gesture or a physical misdirection. You are hiding the method behind meaning. The audience is not looking away from the trick. They are looking at something more interesting than the trick.
The difference is crucial. Physical misdirection works in moments. You redirect attention for the half-second you need and then bring it back. Narrative misdirection — Level Two scripting — works continuously. It occupies the audience’s processing power for the entire duration of the routine, not just during the critical moments. The result is that the entire routine, from beginning to end, is experienced as story rather than as procedure.
Rewriting from the Inside Out
After understanding the distinction between Level One and Level Two, I rewrote three of my routines. Not the methods. Not the effects. Not the procedures. Just the scripts.
For each routine, I asked myself: is the audience, at every moment, engaged with something worth their cognitive attention? Is there a story happening? Is there humor developing? Is there an emotional arc building? Or are there gaps — moments where the script goes neutral, where I am narrating the procedure without adding value, where the audience’s mind is free to wander toward analysis?
The gaps were worse than I expected. In one routine, there was a stretch of about fifteen seconds where I said nothing of substance — just transitional filler while I set up the next phase. Fifteen seconds of cognitive freedom during which the audience could, and probably did, start reconstructing what they had just seen. Fifteen seconds of “Hm, that was interesting, but how exactly did he…” That is the analytical window. That is where the magic degrades from experience to puzzle.
I filled those fifteen seconds with a story. A brief, relevant anecdote that connected the previous phase of the routine to the next one and, not coincidentally, occupied the audience’s attention during a period when their analysis would have been most active. The story was genuine — it was about a time Adam Wilber and I were testing a product idea for Vulpine Creations and the concept failed spectacularly in a way that was funny in retrospect — and it connected naturally to the theme of the routine.
The effect of adding those fifteen seconds of narrative was disproportionate to the effort involved. The routine felt tighter even though it was technically longer. The climax landed harder because the audience arrived at it in a state of emotional engagement rather than analytical curiosity. And the overall experience shifted from “a man showing me a trick” to “a man telling me a story in which something impossible happened.”
The Burger Principle in Practice
Burger’s advice — don’t talk so much, and slow down — seems contradictory to the idea of filling every moment with engaging content. But it is not. Talking too much and talking engagingly are different things. Most performers who talk too much are filling silence with filler — explaining what they are doing, narrating the obvious, repeating themselves, padding the dead air with words that carry no meaning. This is the opposite of Level Two. This is Level Zero: words that neither justify procedure nor engage attention.
Level Two scripting means every word earns its place. Every sentence serves the engagement. If a sentence does not advance the story, generate an emotion, build an expectation, or create a laugh, it does not belong. The discipline is not in saying more but in saying only what matters.
Slowing down is part of this. When you rush through a script, the audience cannot process the content deeply enough for it to occupy their cognitive resources. The words wash over them without sinking in, and the analytical mind, finding itself unoccupied, goes back to its default activity: figuring things out. When you slow down, each word has weight. Each sentence registers. The audience’s cognitive budget is spent on processing the content rather than reconstructing the procedure.
I practiced this in my hotel room mirror — an endless series of evenings alone in hotels across Austria, because my consulting work has me on the road more nights than I am home. I would perform a routine at my normal pace, then perform it again at seventy percent speed, then again at fifty percent. The slower versions felt unnatural at first. Then they felt theatrical. Then they felt right.
At the slower pace, I could see in my own reflection the moments where the script was doing the heavy lifting. The moments where the story was carrying the audience’s attention. The moments where the meaning was doing the work that my hands usually had to do alone.
The Paradox of Imperfect Excellence
There is a paradox at the heart of Level Two that took me a long time to accept. The paradox is this: a technically imperfect performance with a brilliant script will almost always produce stronger reactions than a technically perfect performance with a mediocre script.
This is not an argument for sloppy technique. Technique matters. The physical execution of your routine should be as good as you can make it. But technique is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one. It is the foundation, not the building. And if your foundation is solid but your building is empty, the audience will feel the emptiness no matter how well the foundation is laid.
I have performed routines where my technique was flawless and the audience response was tepid. And I have performed routines where I made minor errors that I noticed and the audience did not, because they were too engaged with the story to catch the imperfection. Both experiences taught me the same lesson: the audience does not experience your technique. The audience experiences your script. Your technique is invisible when it is good. Your script is visible always.
This is why McCabe places scripting at the center of the performer’s craft, and why I have come to agree with him completely. You can practice a technique for a thousand hours in a hotel room and achieve near-perfection. But if you then stand on stage and deliver that technique inside a script that fails to engage, the thousand hours will not save you. The audience’s mind will be free, and a free mind is an analytical mind, and an analytical mind is the enemy of wonder.
Level Two scripting is not a luxury. It is not something you add after the method is perfected. It is as essential to the routine as the method itself — perhaps more essential, because the method only needs to fool the mind. The script needs to occupy it.
I learned this backward, through a mistake in Vienna that nobody noticed because they were laughing at a story about Salzburg. The mistake should have been visible. The story made it invisible. And that taught me more about the relationship between script and method than any book ever could — though McCabe’s book gave me the language to understand what I had accidentally discovered.