I was sitting in a hotel room in Salzburg, flipping through Pete McCabe’s Scripting Magic, when I hit a passage that stopped me cold. McCabe draws a distinction that seems obvious once you hear it but that I had never consciously made: effect is not the same as plot. An effect is the magical power being demonstrated — mind reading, vanishing, transformation, prediction. A plot is the sequence of events, situations, and characters that demonstrate that power.
Two tricks can share the exact same effect and have completely different plots. Two performers can both read minds, but one tells the story of a psychological experiment gone wrong while the other plays the role of a detective solving a crime using intuition. Same effect. Different plots. And one of them will be dramatically more compelling than the other.
I put the book down and looked at the small stack of index cards where I had been outlining my current repertoire. I had six routines that I was performing regularly in corporate keynotes and private events. Every single one of them had an effect. Not a single one of them had a real plot.
The Demonstration Trap
Here is what I mean. Take one of my card routines — I will not describe the method, but I will describe the structure. A card is selected. Things happen. The card is revealed in a surprising way. That is an effect: the card is found. But what is the plot? What is the story being told? Who are the characters? What is at stake?
When I was honest with myself, the answer was: there is no plot. There is no story. There are no characters beyond me and the spectator, and neither of us has a defined role. Nothing is at stake beyond whether or not I can find a card. The routine is a demonstration. It demonstrates the effect of finding a selected card. That is all it does.
And here is the uncomfortable truth: a demonstration is not a performance. A demonstration is what you do in a shop to sell a product. “Look, this blender can crush ice.” That is a demonstration. It has an effect — the ice is crushed. It has no plot. Nobody cares about the blender’s journey or the ice’s inner life. The demonstration exists to prove a functional claim, and once the claim is proved, the demonstration is over and forgotten.
Most magic routines are demonstrations. The performer demonstrates that they can read minds, find cards, make things vanish, predict the future. The audience watches, acknowledges the skill, and moves on. There is no emotional investment because there is no plot to invest in. There is no tension because there is no story to create tension. There is admiration, perhaps. Puzzlement, certainly. But not engagement. Not the feeling of being pulled into something larger than a display of ability.
I had been performing demonstrations for two years and calling them routines.
What Plot Actually Means
Let me be precise about this, because precision matters here. McCabe defines plot as the sequence of events and situations that frame the magical effect. Plot gives the effect context, motivation, and stakes. Plot answers the questions that the effect alone cannot answer: why is this happening, what is at risk, and why should I care?
Consider two routines that share the same effect — a prediction written before the show matches a freely chosen word. In the first routine, the performer says: “Before the show, I wrote down a prediction. Please think of any word. Open the envelope. They match.” That is a demonstration. The effect is clean and impressive. The plot is nonexistent.
In the second routine, the performer tells a story. Years ago, a psychologist ran an experiment to see whether certain words occur to people more frequently under specific emotional conditions. The performer became fascinated by this research and started testing it in real conversations. Tonight, knowing that this particular audience would be in a specific emotional state — having just finished a three-course dinner, relaxed, socially open — the performer wrote down the word that the research suggests would be most likely to surface in someone’s mind under those exact conditions.
Same effect. But the second version has characters (the psychologist, the performer as researcher), a sequence of events (the research, the testing, the prediction), stakes (will the research hold up in a live setting?), and a reason for the audience to care (they are learning something about how their own minds work). The second version has plot.
Is the plot true? That is beside the point. The plot creates a framework that transforms a demonstration into an experience.
My Consulting Parallel
This distinction hit me harder than it might have hit someone who only performs, because I recognized it instantly from my work as a strategy consultant. In consulting, we make the same distinction all the time, though we use different words.
A consultant who walks into a boardroom and presents data is demonstrating competence. Here are the numbers. Here is the analysis. Here is the recommendation. The data is correct. The analysis is sound. The recommendation is reasonable. But the presentation is a demonstration, and demonstrations do not win clients. Demonstrations do not change minds. Demonstrations do not inspire action.
The consultants who win — the ones who get the follow-up call, the expanded engagement, the referral to the next board — are the ones who tell a story. They take the same data and wrap it in a narrative. Here is where the company was. Here is what happened. Here is where the company is now. Here is what will happen if nothing changes. Here is a different future. Here is how we get there.
Same data. Same analysis. Same recommendation. But the second version has plot. It has characters (the company, its competitors, its customers). It has a sequence of events (the journey from past to present to possible future). It has stakes (what happens if nothing changes versus what happens if the recommendation is adopted). And it has a reason for the audience — the board — to care.
I had known this about consulting for fifteen years. I had built my career on it. And I had somehow failed to apply it to my magic.
The Audit
Once McCabe’s distinction clicked, I audited every routine in my set. I wrote each one on a separate sheet of paper and listed two things: the effect and the plot.
The effects were easy. I could describe each one in a sentence. A card is found. A thought is read. A prediction matches a choice. A drawing is duplicated. These are clear, definable, and distinct.
The plots were not easy, because most of them did not exist. What I had been calling “patter” — the words I said during the routine — was not plot. It was narration of the demonstration. “I am going to ask you to think of something.” “Please verify that I could not have known this.” “The prediction was written before we began.” These are stage directions spoken aloud. They describe what is happening without creating any dramatic structure around it.
Only one of my routines had anything approaching a real plot, and it was, not coincidentally, the routine that consistently got the strongest reactions. It was a mentalism piece where I told a personal story — about how I first became interested in the way people make decisions under pressure — and wove the effect into the narrative so that the magical moment felt like the climax of the story rather than the point of the demonstration. In that routine, the effect served the plot. In every other routine, there was no plot for the effect to serve.
The Rewrite
Rewriting is harder than writing from scratch. When you write from scratch, you have no attachments. When you rewrite, you have to let go of lines you like, structures you are comfortable with, and patterns that have become muscle memory. I had been performing these routines for long enough that the patter was automatic. Changing the words meant disrupting the autopilot, and disrupting the autopilot meant a period of awkwardness where nothing felt natural.
I started with my weakest routine — the one that had an effect but absolutely no plot and consistently received polite but unremarkable reactions. The effect was fine. The method was reliable. The problem was entirely in the framing.
I spent three nights in a hotel room in Linz working on it. Not on the method. Not on the handling. On the story. I asked myself: why would this effect happen? Not “how does it work” — that is the method, which is the performer’s concern — but “why would a person have this ability, and what does it mean?” I needed a reason for the magic to exist within the world of the routine. I needed characters, even if the only characters were me and the spectator. I needed a sequence of events that created forward momentum. I needed stakes.
What I came up with was not brilliant. It was a simple framing: a story about a conversation I had with someone who worked in behavioral research, a casual observation about how people telegraph their decisions before they are consciously aware of making them, and an invitation for the audience to test whether this was true. The effect remained identical. The method was untouched. But the audience now had a reason to be interested before the magic happened, a framework for interpreting the magic when it did happen, and a lingering question afterward about what the experience meant.
The first time I performed the rewritten version was at a corporate event in Graz. The reaction was not just better — it was categorically different. People did not just applaud the effect. They talked about the premise. They asked questions. They wanted to discuss the idea of unconscious decision-making. The plot had given them something to hold onto, something beyond “that was a good trick.”
Why This Matters Beyond Magic
I keep coming back to the parallel with consulting because it illuminates something universal. In any context where you are communicating with an audience — a boardroom, a stage, a classroom, a podcast — the raw content is the effect. The data, the information, the demonstration of capability. That is what you are delivering.
But the plot is what makes the delivery matter. The plot is the narrative structure that transforms information into experience, that gives the audience a reason to care, that creates the emotional investment without which no amount of impressive content will be remembered.
Most presentations are demonstrations. Most sales pitches are demonstrations. Most teaching is demonstration. And most magic is demonstration. The minority that transcends — the presentations that change decisions, the pitches that close deals, the lessons that transform understanding, the magic that creates genuine wonder — all share one thing: they have a plot.
The Ongoing Work
I am not done. Not remotely. Rewriting my routines to include real plots is slow, unglamorous work. It happens late at night in hotel rooms with a laptop and a stack of index cards. It involves writing dialogue that sounds natural, testing framing stories against real audiences, and accepting that many first drafts will be worse than what I am replacing.
But the direction is clear. Every routine needs an effect — that is the engine. And every routine needs a plot — that is the vehicle. The engine without the vehicle is just noise. Impressive noise, perhaps. But noise that goes nowhere and carries no one.
The best magic I have ever experienced — as a spectator, not as a performer — was magic where I forgot I was watching a trick. I was pulled into a story, invested in an outcome, curious about what would happen next. The magical moment, when it arrived, felt like the culmination of something rather than the point of something. That is what plot does. It makes the magic feel like it matters.
I am still learning how to make my magic matter. But at least now I know what I am building. Not demonstrations. Stories. Stories that happen to be impossible.