I was struggling with openings. Not the opening of my show — I had that mostly figured out — but the opening of individual routines within the show. The first sentence. The very first thing I said after the applause from the previous piece faded and the audience settled back into their seats, waiting to hear what came next.
Most of the time, what came next was something forgettable. “For my next piece, I’d like to try something different.” Or worse: “Has anyone here ever had their mind read?” These openings were functional in the way that a beige hallway is functional. They got you from one room to another. Nobody remembered walking through them.
The problem nagged at me for weeks. I was performing regularly enough — corporate keynotes in Vienna, private events in Graz, the occasional conference in Salzburg — that I had plenty of opportunities to notice the problem. Every time I transitioned into a new routine, there was a tiny dip in energy. A fractional sag in the room’s attention. People reaching for their water glasses. The previous piece had ended strong, and then I opened my mouth and said something that let the air out of the room.
I could not figure out how to fix it until I found the answer in a place I did not expect: journalism.
The Journalist’s Toolbox
Pete McCabe, in Scripting Magic, makes a connection that changed how I think about the first sentence of any routine. He points out that journalists have spent decades codifying the art of the opening line. They call it the “lead” — the first sentence or paragraph of an article — and they have identified specific structures that reliably grab a reader’s attention and pull them into the story.
McCabe’s insight is that these structures translate directly to magic performance. A journalist is trying to hook a reader who might turn the page. A performer is trying to hook an audience that might mentally disengage. The challenge is identical: you have one sentence to make someone decide that what comes next is worth their attention.
I went down this rabbit hole the way I go down every rabbit hole — obsessively, late at night, in a hotel room somewhere in Upper Austria with my laptop balanced on a stack of pillows. I read about journalistic leads. I read about copy writing. I read about screenplay openings. And I came back to McCabe’s core five types, because they were clean, practical, and immediately applicable.
Here they are, and here is what happened when I tested each one.
Type One: The News Lead
The news lead is the most direct. It announces something that just happened, is about to happen, or is happening right now. Journalists use it for breaking stories because it creates urgency. “Last night, something impossible happened in this room.”
I tested this opening for a mentalism piece during a corporate event in Innsbruck. The audience was a group of about eighty executives from an insurance company. They were attentive but reserved — the kind of group that does not give you energy for free; you have to earn every ounce of it.
I walked to center stage after my previous routine and said: “Earlier today, before any of you arrived, I wrote something down and sealed it in that envelope.” I pointed to an envelope that had been visible on a small table since the beginning of the show. “What I wrote will become relevant in about four minutes.”
The room shifted. I could feel it. Eighty people simultaneously decided that the next four minutes were worth their full attention, because I had just promised them a payoff. The news lead works by creating a contract: something has happened, and I am about to tell you why it matters.
The limitation I discovered is that news leads work best when there is a prop or a visible element that the audience can anchor their attention to. Without the envelope, the statement would have been abstract. With it, the statement was a fuse attached to a specific, visible thing that the audience could watch and wonder about.
Type Two: The Descriptive Lead
The descriptive lead paints a picture. It puts the audience in a scene. Journalists use it for feature stories, where the goal is immersion rather than urgency. “Imagine a room with no windows, no doors, and one chair in the center.”
I tested this for the opening of a routine that involves a spectator making choices — I will not describe the method, but the routine requires the audience to imagine a scenario. The descriptive lead turned out to be the most natural way to begin. Instead of jumping straight into procedure, I spent fifteen seconds painting a picture.
“Imagine you are standing in a library. Not a modern library — an old one. The kind with ladders on rails and books so old the pages have turned yellow. You are standing in front of a shelf, and something about one particular book catches your eye. You cannot explain why. You just know you need to pull it off the shelf.”
This opening did something remarkable: it slowed the room down. The previous routine had ended with energy and laughter. This descriptive lead shifted the audience into a different register entirely. It was like dimming the lights with words. People leaned forward. The room got quiet. And by the time I transitioned into the routine itself, the audience was already half inside the story.
The limitation is pace. Descriptive leads take time. If the audience is restless, or if you are in the middle of a fast-paced sequence, a descriptive lead can feel like slamming the brakes. It works best as a deliberate gear change — when you want to shift from high energy to intimacy, from laughter to wonder.
Type Three: The Quote Lead
The quote lead borrows authority. It opens with someone else’s words — someone interesting, someone credible, someone whose name alone carries weight. Journalists use it when the quote itself is more compelling than any summary could be.
I have used quote leads more than any other type, and the reason is simple: they buy you credibility without requiring you to be the authority. “Einstein once said that imagination is more important than knowledge.” “Mark Twain wrote that it is easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled.”
The trick — and yes, I recognize the irony of using that word — is choosing quotes that are genuinely surprising or that reframe something the audience thought they understood. A cliched quote does worse than no quote at all. If the audience has heard it a thousand times, you have burned your opening sentence on something that actually decreases their attention.
My most effective quote lead came from an unexpected source. I opened a routine by saying: “A psychologist named Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for proving something that magicians have known for centuries: your brain takes shortcuts, and those shortcuts can be manipulated.” The audience — a room full of strategy professionals in Vienna — sat up because I had connected magic to something they cared about. I was not just a performer doing the next trick. I was someone who had done his homework and was about to show them something relevant to their world.
Quote leads, I learned, work best when the quote connects the world of magic to the world of the audience. The more specific that connection, the more powerful the opening.
Type Four: The Question Lead
The question lead engages the audience by asking them to think. Journalists use it to create curiosity — the question itself implies an answer worth discovering. “Have you ever forgotten the name of someone you met five minutes ago?”
This is the type I had been using badly. “Has anyone here ever had their mind read?” is a question lead, but it is a weak one because the answer is obvious (no) and the question does not create genuine curiosity. It is a rhetorical setup for what the performer is about to do, and the audience can feel the machinery.
A good question lead asks something the audience actually wants to answer. Something that makes them search their own experience. Something that creates a tiny moment of introspection before the routine begins.
I reworked my question leads during a long train ride from Vienna to Klagenfurt, scribbling in a notebook while Austrian countryside rolled past the window. The bad version: “Have you ever wondered if someone could read your thoughts?” The reworked version: “When was the last time you lied to someone and they believed you completely?”
The difference is specificity and stakes. The first question is about a generic concept. The second question is about a specific memory — a time, a person, a lie, a feeling of getting away with something. The second question makes the audience search their own biography. And while they are searching, while they are remembering that specific lie and that specific person, I have their complete attention. The routine can begin from a place of engagement rather than passive observation.
Type Five: The Anecdotal Lead
The anecdotal lead tells a brief story. It is the journalist’s way of starting with a human moment before zooming out to the larger subject. “Last Tuesday, a woman in a coffee shop in Graz handed me a playing card and said, ‘I knew you’d need this.’”
This is the type that feels most natural to me, which makes sense — I am a storyteller by temperament, and my consulting work has trained me to open with anecdotes rather than abstractions. But the anecdotal lead has a specific requirement that took me a while to understand: the anecdote must be brief, and it must connect directly to the routine that follows.
The anecdote is not the routine. It is the on-ramp. If the on-ramp is too long, the audience starts wondering when they are going to get to the highway. If the on-ramp has nothing to do with the destination, the audience feels cheated when they arrive somewhere unexpected.
My best anecdotal lead was simple. Three sentences. “Two weeks ago, I was practicing something in my hotel room — which is where I practice everything, by the way, surrounded by minibar bottles and bad lighting — and something went wrong in a way I did not expect. The card I was working with ended up somewhere it should not have been. And I spent the next hour trying to figure out whether I had made a mistake or discovered something new.”
Three sentences. Maybe twelve seconds of stage time. But those twelve seconds accomplished four things: they established me as someone who practices (credibility), they created a sense of mystery (what went wrong?), they humanized me (hotel rooms, mistakes, confusion), and they set up the routine that followed as an exploration rather than a demonstration.
The Testing Ground
Over the course of about three months, I tested all five types across different audiences and different routines. What I discovered was not that one type was universally superior — it was that the right type depended on two variables: the audience and the routine.
For corporate audiences in strategy or finance, quote leads and question leads worked best. These audiences respond to intellectual engagement. They want to feel that the performer is operating at their level.
For mixed audiences at private events or holiday parties, anecdotal leads and news leads worked best. These audiences respond to story and urgency. They want to be entertained from the first syllable.
For intimate audiences — small groups, close-up settings, post-dinner performances — descriptive leads worked best. These audiences respond to atmosphere. They want to be transported.
And within a single show, I learned to vary the types. If I opened one routine with a question lead, I would open the next with a news lead or an anecdotal lead. The variation itself keeps the audience alert. If every routine starts the same way, the audience develops a pattern expectation, and pattern expectation is the enemy of surprise.
The One-Sentence Test
Here is the discipline I developed from this exercise, and it is the discipline I still apply today: before I perform any routine, I must be able to write down the opening sentence. Not the gist. Not the idea. The exact sentence. Word for word. Because if I cannot write it, I will improvise it, and improvised opening sentences are almost always worse than crafted ones.
I keep a small notebook — physical, not digital — where every routine in my repertoire has its opening sentence written in ink. When I am preparing for a specific show, I review those sentences and adjust them for the audience. The sentence for a Vienna banking conference is not the same sentence I would use for a product launch in Graz. Same routine. Different opening line. Different type of lead.
The notebook is one of the most useful tools I own, and it contains no secrets. Just sentences. The first sentences. The ones that make the difference between an audience that is waiting for you to impress them and an audience that is already leaning forward, curious about what comes next.
Journalism taught me something that magic culture rarely discusses: the first sentence is not a warm-up. It is not a throat-clearing exercise. It is the single most important piece of writing in the entire routine. Get it right, and the audience is yours before the magic even begins. Get it wrong, and you spend the rest of the routine trying to recover ground you never should have lost.