I thought I had done the work. I had scripts for every routine in my set. I had worked through the levels of scripting as method. I had experimented with false causes. I had tightened my language, cut the filler, placed engaging content at the critical moments. By any reasonable standard, my routines were scripted.
Then I encountered a framework from an entirely unexpected source — a comic book writer — and realized that everything I had been writing was missing the foundation.
The framework is from Alan Moore, the writer behind some of the most celebrated graphic novels ever created. Pete McCabe introduces Moore’s framework in Scripting Magic 2 as a pre-scripting process: six questions to answer before writing a single word of script. When I first saw the list, I assumed it would be another version of the standard advice about having a story and a theme. It was not. It was more fundamental and more devastating than that.
Here are Moore’s six elements, as McCabe adapts them:
One: an idea you wish to communicate. Two: a plot. Three: solid, rounded characters. Four: a solid, credible world. Five: a hook. Six: unity.
I read the list. I looked at my routines. And I understood, with the cold clarity that accompanies unwelcome realizations, that most of my routines had none of these things. Or rather, they had fragments — a half-formed idea here, a gesture toward character there — but none of them had all six. None of them even had most of them.
My routines had effects but no ideas. They had actions but no plots. They had props but no world. They had me on stage, but I was not a character — I was a presenter. And the pieces had no unity because there was nothing to unify.
Element One: An Idea You Wish to Communicate
The first element is the most important and the most commonly missing. Moore asks: what is the idea? Not what is the trick, not what is the effect, not what happens — what is the idea? What concept, theme, or truth does this piece communicate to the audience?
McCabe reinforces this with a reference from advertising: the best ads communicate a single powerful idea. Not a product. Not a feature. Not a benefit. An idea. The product is the vehicle. The idea is the cargo.
When I applied this to my routines, the diagnosis was uncomfortable. My routines communicated: “I can do something you cannot explain.” That was it. That was the idea. “Look at this impossible thing.” Every routine, regardless of the effect, communicated the same non-idea. There was no theme. There was no concept. There was no truth being explored. There was only impossibility, and impossibility, repeated across multiple routines, is not an idea. It is a category.
I sat in a hotel room in Innsbruck with my notebook and wrote, at the top of a blank page, the question McCabe suggests: “Write in one sentence what your trick is really about. If you cannot, you do not yet have a big idea.”
I could not. Not for a single routine in my set. I could write what happened in the routine. I could write what the audience saw. I could write what the effect was. But I could not write what the routine was about, because it was not about anything. It was just a demonstration of impossibility dressed in words.
This was the moment I understood why Moore’s framework is a pre-scripting process. You cannot write a good script for a routine that has no idea, for the same reason you cannot write a good essay about nothing. The words have nowhere to go. Every line I had written for my routines was decorative because there was nothing to express. The scripts were wallpaper on an empty house.
Element Two: A Plot
Moore’s second element is plot — the sequence of events that demonstrates the magical power. McCabe makes a critical distinction here that I had never considered: the plot is not the effect. The effect is the magical power being demonstrated (the ability to read minds, the ability to transform objects). The plot is the story that demonstrates that power.
Two routines can have the same effect — say, prediction — but entirely different plots. One might be a story about a letter your grandfather left you. Another might be a game involving the audience. Same effect, different plots. And the plot is what the audience experiences, not the effect.
When I evaluated my routines against this element, I found that most of them had no plot at all. They had procedures. They had sequences of actions. But a sequence of actions is not a plot any more than a grocery list is a story. A plot requires characters, motivation, conflict, and resolution. My routines had none of these. They had: introduce the props, engage the volunteer, execute the procedure, reveal the effect. That is a recipe, not a plot.
The fix required thinking about each routine not as “what happens” but as “what story is being told.” For the prediction routine I used in my keynotes, the plot became: a consultant who studies how organizations make decisions discovers that his own decisions are just as predictable as the ones he advises on. The prediction is not just a trick. It is the punchline of a story about the gap between the advice we give and the patterns we follow. The audience goes on a journey — from curiosity about decision-making to self-recognition about their own predictability — and the prediction is the climax of that journey.
Same effect. New plot. Entirely different experience.
Element Three: Solid, Rounded Characters
This element forced the most personal reckoning. Moore says the piece needs solid, rounded characters. In magic, the primary character is the performer. And the question is: who am I in this piece?
For most of my performing career, the answer was: myself. I was Felix. A consultant who does magic. That seemed like enough. It was not.
“Myself” is not a character. “Myself” is a default. A character has specific qualities that are deliberately heightened and projected. A character has desires, vulnerabilities, a perspective that the audience can identify with or be intrigued by. “Myself” has none of these things unless they are consciously developed.
McCabe’s book includes a contributed essay by John Lovick that identifies four essential characteristics of a performer’s persona: consistency, originality, specificity, and vulnerability. When I measured my stage presence against these four characteristics, I found that I had consistency (the audience knew what to expect from me) and, arguably, originality (a strategy consultant doing magic is not a common combination). But I lacked specificity and vulnerability.
Specificity means the character is detailed and particular, not vague and general. I was vaguely “a consultant who does magic.” I needed to be specifically “a consultant who is genuinely puzzled by how irrational his own decisions are, who uses magic to explore the gap between what we think we control and what actually controls us.” That is specific. That is a character. That gives every piece a through-line and every script a voice.
Vulnerability means the audience senses that something is at stake. In my early performances, nothing was at stake for me. I was presenting effects. If they worked, great. If they did not, I would move on. There was no personal risk, no emotional investment, no sense that the outcome mattered to me as a person rather than as a performer. The audience could sense this absence, and it limited their emotional investment. Why should they care about the outcome if I did not seem to?
I added vulnerability by adding honesty. In my scripts, I started admitting uncertainty. “I have done this many times, and it still makes me nervous, because if the prediction is wrong, the idea I just spent five minutes explaining falls apart.” This is true. Predictions can go wrong. Admitting that possibility creates stakes. The audience is now invested in the outcome not just as spectators of an effect but as participants in a narrative where the character has something to lose.
Element Four: A Solid, Credible World
Every piece of magic exists within a reality. Moore asks: what is the world of this piece? If you do not define it, the audience defaults to the most mundane interpretation available: “a person doing a trick.”
For my keynotes, the world is the professional world of strategy and innovation. This is not a world I have to construct. It is the world the audience already inhabits. The world is their conference room, their office, their decision-making challenges. I simply make it explicit that the magic is happening within that world rather than outside it.
This is one of the advantages of performing magic within a keynote context rather than in a standalone magic show. The world is pre-built. The audience brings the world with them. My job is to demonstrate that magic is possible within their world — that the impossible can happen in their conference room, with their decisions, in their reality — rather than asking them to enter a magical world that exists only on stage.
Element Five: A Hook
The hook is what grabs the audience’s attention and makes them care. Moore’s insight is that the hook is not the opening line. The hook is the reason the audience invests in the piece.
McCabe borrows from journalism to suggest three types of hooks: the news lead (begin with the most surprising information), the descriptive lead (paint a picture), and the quote lead (begin with someone else’s words). I experimented with all three and found that the news lead works best for my corporate context. “Last quarter, a company I advised made a decision that seemed rational to everyone in the room. It was wrong. And I am going to show you why your brain would have made the same mistake.”
That is a hook. It promises relevance, it establishes stakes, and it creates curiosity. The audience is now invested before a single prop has appeared.
Element Six: Unity
Unity is the element that makes the other five elements work together as a single piece rather than a collection of parts. The idea informs the plot. The plot features the character. The character inhabits the world. The world provides the context for the hook. And the hook leads back to the idea. Everything connects.
Before Moore’s framework, my routines were assembled from parts that did not particularly relate to each other. The introduction was about one thing. The effect was about another thing. The script was about a third thing. There was no unity because there was no organizing principle.
After the framework, each routine is built from a single idea that informs every other element. The idea determines the plot. The plot determines the character’s role. The character inhabits a specific world. The world provides a hook. And the hook promises an exploration of the idea. Every element serves every other element. Nothing is independent. Everything is connected.
The Pre-Scripting Checklist
I now use Moore’s six elements as a checklist before I write a single word of script. On a blank page, I write six lines:
Idea: [one sentence about what this piece is really about] Plot: [the story that demonstrates the magical power] Character: [who I am in this piece, specifically] World: [the reality this piece inhabits] Hook: [why the audience should care from the first moment] Unity: [how all five elements connect to each other]
If I cannot fill in all six lines, the piece is not ready to be scripted. I go back and develop the missing elements before I write a word of patter. This discipline has eliminated the frustrating experience of writing a script that feels hollow, because the hollowness is now diagnosed before the writing begins.
The framework came from a comic book writer. It was adapted by a comedy writer who scripts magic. And it is used by a strategy consultant in Austria who discovered magic as an adult and now uses it in keynotes.
The source does not matter. The framework matters. And the framework has transformed not just how I write my scripts but how I think about what my routines are for. They are not demonstrations of impossibility. They are vehicles for ideas. And ideas, when they have plot, character, world, hook, and unity, are more magical than any effect performed in a vacuum.