John Lovick, as presented in Pete McCabe’s Scripting Magic, identifies four elements that a performance persona must have to work. Four elements. Not suggestions. Requirements. If any one of them is missing, the persona is incomplete, and the audience will feel the gap even if they cannot name it.
The four elements are: consistency, originality, specificity, and vulnerability.
When I first encountered this framework, I did what I always do with frameworks — I used it as a diagnostic tool. I applied it to my own performance persona with the clinical detachment of a consultant evaluating a client’s organizational structure. And the diagnosis was not flattering. Of the four elements, I had two. The other two were either missing or so weak as to be functionally absent.
The exercise was one of the most productive things I have done in my development as a performer.
Consistency: The Baseline
Consistency means the audience knows what to expect from you. Not in the sense that your show is predictable — nobody wants that — but in the sense that your persona is stable. If you are dry and analytical in one routine and loud and manic in the next, the audience does not know who they are watching. The shifts in register create cognitive dissonance that prevents the audience from settling into the relationship that a performance requires.
Consistency was one of the two elements I had. Mostly by accident, not by design. Because my performance persona was essentially a mildly amplified version of my real self — a calm, curious, analytical person — it was naturally consistent. I did not shift registers between routines because I only had one register. My energy level was stable. My tone was stable. My way of relating to the audience was stable.
But I want to be honest about something: I had consistency partly because I lacked range. A performer who can shift between humor and drama, between intimacy and spectacle, faces a much harder consistency challenge than a performer whose range is narrow. My consistency was real, but it was also, in some sense, a default rather than a choice.
Over time, I have worked to expand my range while maintaining consistency. The key, I discovered, is that consistency is not about sameness — it is about coherence. You can be funny in one moment and serious in the next, as long as both moments feel like they come from the same person. The through-line is the personality, not the tone. As long as the audience recognizes the person behind the shifting tones, consistency is maintained.
Originality: The Differentiator
Originality means something distinctly yours. Not gimmick originality — not a weird prop or an unusual costume or a never-before-seen effect. Persona originality. Something about the way you see the world, the way you relate to magic, the way you communicate with the audience that is recognizably, unmistakably you.
This was my other strong element, though I did not recognize it until the framework made me look. My originality comes from my background. I am not a lifelong magician. I am a strategy consultant who came to magic as an adult, through intellectual curiosity, via a rabbit hole that started with a deck of cards in hotel rooms and led through the history and psychology of magic. That journey is mine. Nobody else has it. And it gives me a perspective on magic that is genuinely different from the perspective of someone who grew up in the tradition.
Austin Kleon, whose Steal Like an Artist I had read long before I started performing, argues that originality is not about creating something from nothing — it is about the unique combination of influences that only you have. “You are a remix of your influences,” Kleon writes, and the specific combination of strategy consulting, adult onset magic, Austrian business culture, and genuine fascination with cognitive psychology that makes up my creative DNA is a remix that nobody else is running.
The challenge with originality is not finding it — everyone is original by virtue of being a unique person with unique experiences. The challenge is expressing it. Many performers suppress their originality in favor of conformity, performing the way they think a magician is supposed to perform rather than the way their particular perspective would lead them to perform. I caught myself doing this in my early months, adopting the rhythms and phrases and attitudes of other performers because they felt like the “right” way to do it. Every time I adopted someone else’s approach, I diluted my own originality.
Specificity: Where I Failed
Specificity means detail. Vague personas fail. Detail makes them real.
This is where my self-assessment turned uncomfortable. My persona was consistent and original, but it was not specific. I was “a curious, analytical person who finds magic fascinating.” That is a description, but it is not a specific character. It could apply to a dozen different people. It lacks the concrete details that make a persona vivid and memorable.
What are the specific details? What specifically am I curious about? What specifically do I find fascinating? What specific experiences shaped my perspective? What specific quirks, habits, preferences, and biases does my persona have? Without these details, the audience gets a sketch where they need a portrait.
I realized that I had been operating at the level of adjectives — curious, analytical, dry, calm — when I needed to be operating at the level of stories. Adjectives describe. Stories specify. Telling the audience I am curious is vague. Telling them about the night in a hotel room in Graz when I fell down a Wikipedia rabbit hole about a psychological experiment from 1962 and ended up reading until three in the morning — that is specific. The story communicates curiosity more effectively than the adjective does, and it adds detail that makes the persona concrete.
Judy Carter, whose The New Comedy Bible approaches persona from the comedy side, emphasizes that authenticity is your only bankable asset. You cannot fake specificity. You cannot invent convincing details about a persona that is not really you. The details have to come from your real life, your real experiences, your real obsessions. Generic details feel generic. Specific, true details feel alive.
I began collecting specific details about my own relationship with magic. The exact moment I realized magic was not “just for kids” — a slow burn, not a single event, but I could identify the moment the balance tipped. The specific books that changed my thinking. The specific performances I witnessed that rewired my understanding. The specific mistakes I made that taught me the most. These details became the material I wove into my scripts, replacing vague statements about curiosity with specific stories about what that curiosity looked like in practice.
Vulnerability: Where I Failed Harder
Vulnerability means something must be at stake. The audience needs to see that the persona has something to lose. Not physical danger — you do not need to swallow swords or play with fire. Emotional vulnerability. Intellectual vulnerability. The willingness to be wrong, to be surprised, to be genuinely uncertain about the outcome.
This was my weakest element by far, and discovering that it was missing explained a pattern in audience reactions that had puzzled me for months.
My reactions were always appreciative but never deeply invested. The audience admired what I did. They were impressed by the effects. They applauded generously. But there was a distance. They were watching a competent performance rather than sharing a human experience. The admiration was real, but it was the admiration you give to a skilled professional, not the emotional investment you give to someone whose outcome matters to you.
The reason was that nothing was at stake for me. My persona was calm, composed, and in control. I projected the confidence of someone who knows what is going to happen. And confidence, while attractive, is the opposite of vulnerability. If the audience can tell that you know it is going to work, they have nothing to worry about. If they have nothing to worry about, they have no reason to invest emotionally. They can sit back and watch the show, assured that the professional has it handled.
This is the problem. A competent professional performing competent magic is impressive but not moving. A human being attempting something uncertain, something that genuinely matters to them, something where failure is possible and would be painful — that is moving. That creates the emotional investment that transforms a polished performance into a shared experience.
I had been so focused on projecting competence that I had eliminated vulnerability. The strategy consultant in me — the professional who has been trained to project confidence in boardrooms — had taken over the performer. And the strategy consultant, for all his useful qualities, does not know how to be vulnerable in front of a room full of people.
Building the Missing Elements
Fixing specificity was relatively straightforward, because the material already existed — I just needed to use it. I had specific stories, specific experiences, specific details from my journey that I had been withholding because they felt too personal or too niche. Once I started incorporating them into my scripts, the persona gained dimension. The audience was no longer watching “a curious person.” They were watching a specific person with a specific history and specific reasons for standing in front of them.
Fixing vulnerability was harder, because it required me to change not what I said but how I related to the audience. I had to stop pretending that I was certain of the outcome. I had to let the audience see that the experiment might not work. I had to be honest about the fact that I was still learning, still discovering, still occasionally surprised by what happened.
This meant restructuring moments in my show to include genuine uncertainty. Not manufactured uncertainty — the audience can smell fake suspense as easily as they can smell fake sincerity. But real moments where the outcome was not guaranteed, where the experience depended on the spectator’s choices in ways I could not entirely control, where something about the process was genuinely unknown to me.
It also meant being more honest in my scripting about my own limitations. Instead of presenting myself as someone who has mastered the psychology of perception, I began presenting myself as someone who is still fascinated by it, still learning about it, still occasionally wrong about it. “I think this will work” instead of “this will work.” “Something I’ve been exploring” instead of “something I’ve discovered.” Small linguistic shifts that communicated a very different relationship to the material.
The first time I performed with these adjustments — at a private event in Vienna, about thirty people — I felt exposed. The confidence armor was thinner. The uncertainty was real. And the audience responded with something I had not experienced before: they rooted for me. They leaned forward not just to see what would happen but because they wanted it to work. They were invested, not just watching. When the effect landed, the reaction was not polite admiration. It was shared relief and shared joy. They had been part of the experience in a way that my previous performances had not allowed.
The Four Elements as Ongoing Diagnostic
I now use Lovick’s four elements as a regular diagnostic. After every few performances, I check: Am I still consistent? Is my persona coherent across different contexts and audiences? Am I still original? Have I drifted toward generic performer behaviors, or am I still expressing my specific perspective? Am I being specific enough? Are my scripts rich with detail, or have they become abstract? Am I being vulnerable? Is there something at stake, or have I retreated into the comfort of projected competence?
The elements interact with each other. Specificity enhances originality, because the more specific you are, the more clearly your unique perspective comes through. Vulnerability enhances consistency, because genuine emotional openness is a stable trait, not a performance choice that comes and goes. Consistency supports specificity, because the audience needs a stable framework in which to process the detailed information you are providing. And originality supports vulnerability, because being genuinely yourself is inherently vulnerable — it means the audience is seeing the real you, with all the risk that entails.
Kleon’s observation that you are a remix of your influences applies here too. The four elements are not independent sliders you adjust separately. They are interconnected aspects of a single persona, and strengthening one tends to strengthen the others. When I became more specific, I automatically became more original, because the specific details of my life are the most original things about me. When I became more vulnerable, I automatically became more consistent, because vulnerability forced me to drop the masks that were creating inconsistencies.
Four elements. Four requirements. Two I had. Two I did not. Building the missing two was some of the hardest work I have done as a performer. And the most rewarding.