There were books when I was a kid called Choose Your Own Adventure. You would read to a certain point and the story would present you with a decision: Do you turn right or left? Turn to page 75 or page 76. Each choice led to a different continuation, and each continuation led to more choices, branching and branching until you reached one of many possible endings.
I loved those books. The idea that a story could be responsive, that the path could change based on decisions made in the moment, was thrilling to me as a child and — as it turns out — equally thrilling to me as an adult performer. Because when I read about Jon Armstrong’s approach to scripting in Pete McCabe’s Scripting Magic, I recognized the same architecture immediately. Armstrong does not write linear scripts for his performances. He builds flowcharts. And the audience is the one choosing the adventure.
The Armstrong Philosophy
Armstrong, as McCabe describes him, is a card-only close-up magician who has been performing professionally since he was a teenager. His approach to performance is fundamentally about engagement. He despises — his word is stronger than despise — the moment when a magician asks the audience a question and then runs through anyway, regardless of the answer. The flowchart method is his solution to this problem.
Instead of a single scripted path, Armstrong prepares multiple paths. At every point where the audience might respond — and in close-up and mentalism, there are many such points — he has a prepared response for each likely outcome. If the volunteer says yes, the performance goes one direction. If they say no, it goes another. If they say something unexpected, there is a path for that too. The performance follows a choose-your-own-adventure structure, branching in real time based on what the audience actually does.
The result is a performance that feels genuinely spontaneous. The audience believes they are watching someone think on their feet, respond in the moment, adapt to unpredictable circumstances. What they are actually watching is someone navigate a pre-mapped territory. The map is invisible. The journey looks free.
When I read this in a hotel room in Innsbruck, I immediately understood two things. First, this was the answer to a problem I had been struggling with for months. Second, building a flowchart for a mentalism routine was going to be significantly more complex than I anticipated.
My Problem
The problem was audience interaction in my mentalism pieces. Mentalism, more than any other category of magic, depends on interaction. The performer asks questions. The volunteer makes choices. The audience provides information. And because the information is unpredictable — you cannot control what someone will say when you ask them to think of a number, a name, a memory — the performer must be prepared for a range of responses.
I was not prepared. Not really. I had a script, and when the audience responded in the way I expected, the script worked beautifully. But when the audience deviated — and audiences always deviate, because they are human beings, not actors reading lines — I would stumble. Not badly. Not visibly, most of the time. But internally, I would feel the lurch of being off-script. The smooth flow of the performance would hiccup. My delivery would stiffen slightly as I searched for the right words to get the routine back on track.
These micro-disruptions were invisible to most audience members. But I could feel them. And I knew they were preventing me from reaching the level of naturalness and spontaneity that I was aiming for. I wanted the performance to feel like a conversation. Instead, it felt like a conversation that kept threatening to derail.
Building the First Flowchart
I started with my most interaction-heavy routine — a mentalism piece I use in corporate keynotes. I will not describe the effect, but the structure involves several points where the volunteer makes a choice or provides information. At each of these points, there are multiple possible responses, and the performance needs to accommodate all of them.
I sat down in my hotel room with a large sheet of paper from the hotel business center and a collection of colored pens. At the top, I wrote the opening line of the routine. Below it, I drew the first decision point: the volunteer’s first response. I mapped out three possibilities — the expected response, the most common unexpected response, and a catch-all for anything else.
For each possibility, I wrote the line I would say in response. Each response led to the next segment of the routine, which eventually converged back to the main path. Then the next decision point, another set of branches, another convergence.
By the time I was done, the sheet of paper looked like a circuit diagram. Lines branching, converging, branching again. Color-coded by type: blue for the main path, green for common alternatives, red for recovery lines, orange for humor that could be deployed at any branch point.
The total number of distinct paths through the routine was, by my count, over forty. Forty different ways the performance could unfold, depending on the audience’s responses. Each path was scripted. Each path had been thought through. Each path led to the same climax but arrived there through a different journey.
The Cognitive Load Problem
The first time I tried to perform the flowchart version, I nearly had a mental breakdown. Not on stage — I tested it in my hotel room first, running through scenarios out loud, imagining different audience responses and tracking which branch I was on.
The cognitive load was enormous. Armstrong has been doing this for decades, since he was a teenager. His branching pathways are internalized to the point of reflex. I was trying to navigate forty branches while simultaneously performing a mentalism routine, maintaining eye contact, managing my patter, and executing the technical requirements of the effect.
It was too much. I felt like a student driver trying to check mirrors, shift gears, steer, and follow GPS directions simultaneously. Each individual task was manageable. The combination was overwhelming.
So I simplified. Instead of mapping every possible branch, I identified the three most likely audience responses at each decision point and scripted only those. For anything outside those three, I developed a single all-purpose recovery line that would redirect the performance back to the main path.
This reduced the total number of paths from over forty to about twelve. Still complex, but manageable. And the three most likely responses covered, in my experience, about ninety percent of actual audience behavior. The recovery line handled the other ten percent.
Rehearsing the Branches
The rehearsal process was unlike anything I had done before. Instead of running through the routine start to finish, I practiced jumping between branches. I would start the routine, get to a decision point, and deliberately choose the least likely path. Then I would continue until the next decision point and choose again. Random paths through the flowchart, over and over, until each branch felt as natural as the main path.
This is exhausting work. It requires concentration, repetition, and a willingness to spend most of your rehearsal time on paths that may rarely be used. But the payoff is that when the audience takes you to an unexpected branch, you do not hesitate. You do not stumble. You follow the branch as smoothly as you would follow the main path, because you have rehearsed it just as thoroughly.
I developed a practice game for this. I wrote each possible audience response on a separate index card. At each decision point in the routine, I would draw a card randomly and follow that branch. This forced me to practice every combination, not just the ones I was comfortable with.
I did this in hotel rooms across Austria for about three weeks before I felt confident enough to try it in front of an audience. Three weeks of talking to an empty room, drawing cards, following branches, resetting and starting again. It was the most intensive scripting work I have ever done.
The First Live Test
The first performance with the flowchart script was at a private event in Vienna. About sixty people, a mixed group, high energy. The mentalism piece came in the middle of my set.
The volunteer was a woman who was clearly enjoying herself and was not shy about responding in unexpected ways. In my old, linear-script days, she would have thrown me off. Her responses were quick, witty, and not remotely what a textbook volunteer would say.
But I had the flowchart. When she said something unexpected at the first decision point, I followed the green branch. When she made a joke that got the room laughing, I had an orange line ready — a humor response that acknowledged her joke and redirected the energy. When she gave an answer that fell into my catch-all category, I delivered the recovery line and brought the routine back to the main path.
The performance felt like a conversation. Not a scripted interaction, not a performer directing a volunteer, but an actual, real-time conversation between two people. The audience could not see the map. They saw two people talking, laughing, engaging with each other. And they saw something impossible happen at the end.
After the show, the volunteer came up to me and said, “You are really quick on your feet.” I thanked her, and did not mention the three weeks of flowchart rehearsal or the hotel room index cards.
What the Flowchart Does to Your Character
One unexpected benefit of flowchart scripting is what it does to your on-stage character. When you have scripted responses for multiple audience reactions, you become genuinely responsive. You listen. You react. You engage with what the audience actually says rather than what you need them to say.
This responsiveness reads as authenticity. The audience perceives a performer who is present, who is paying attention, who cares about the interaction. And this perception is accurate — you are present and paying attention, because you need to identify which branch to follow. The flowchart forces you to listen, and listening is the foundation of authentic performance.
Armstrong described this in his interview with McCabe. He said he wants everything he does to seem as though it is happening for the first time. The flowchart makes this possible. Because the performance genuinely is happening differently each time, depending on the audience’s choices. The performer is not reciting a memorized monologue. The performer is navigating a prepared landscape, and the specific route through that landscape is determined in real time.
Building Your Own Flowchart
If you want to try this approach, here is what I have learned from doing it wrong and then doing it less wrong.
Start with your most interactive routine. Identify every point where the audience or a volunteer responds. For each point, write down the three most likely responses. For each response, write the line you would say. Then map how each line leads back to the main path of the routine.
Do not try to map every possible response. You will go mad. Three responses per decision point is enough for a start. Add an all-purpose recovery line for anything outside those three.
Rehearse the branches individually before you try to run the whole routine. Get comfortable with each alternative path on its own. Then start jumping between paths randomly.
And be patient. This is advanced scripting. Armstrong has been doing it for decades. It took me three weeks of intensive practice to get a single routine to the point where the branches felt natural. It is hard work. But the result — a performance that feels genuinely spontaneous within a completely prepared framework — is worth the effort.
The Ongoing Project
I now have flowcharts for three of my performing pieces. They live in a notebook that I carry with me in my travel bag, alongside the card decks and props that are the physical tools of my keynote performances. The flowcharts are the invisible tools. The audience never sees them. But they are the reason the performance feels alive.
I am still building. Still refining. Each live performance teaches me about branches I had not anticipated, responses I had not prepared for, moments where the flowchart needs a new path. The flowcharts are living documents, constantly evolving.
Armstrong compared his approach to choose-your-own-adventure books, and the comparison is perfect. Each performance is a new adventure through a prepared landscape. The destinations are the same. The journeys are always different. And the person choosing the path is not the performer.
It is the audience.
And that is what makes it feel real.