I thought I understood my routines. I had performed them dozens of times. I had scripted them, rehearsed them, adjusted them based on audience feedback, refined the timing, tightened the patter, smoothed the transitions. I knew these routines. Or so I believed, until a simple exercise proved me wrong.
The exercise comes from Pete McCabe’s Scripting Magic, and it is almost absurdly simple. Here is how it works: write a description of your effect in one sentence. Then add three dots — an ellipsis — at the end. And then keep writing. Do not stop. Do not edit. Just see what comes after the three dots.
I first tried this exercise in a hotel room in Vienna on a rainy Tuesday evening. I had nothing else to do — my meetings for the day were finished, dinner had been unremarkable, and I was too restless to sleep. I opened my laptop, pulled up a blank document, and wrote a description of my opening routine.
“A spectator freely selects a card, and against all odds, I find it…”
Then I kept writing.
“…which raises the question of whether the selection was ever really free in the first place. And if it wasn’t free — if I somehow influenced the choice without either of us knowing — then what does that say about every other choice this person makes in their life? In their career? In the meeting they have tomorrow morning where they think they’re making independent strategic decisions?”
I stared at what I had written. That had not been in my head before I wrote it. Those thoughts had been hiding behind the three dots, waiting for me to create the space for them to emerge. The original sentence described what happened in the routine. Everything after the ellipsis described what the routine could mean.
Vonnegut’s Rule and the Problem It Exposes
McCabe connects this exercise to Kurt Vonnegut’s famous rule for writing: “Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.” If a sentence does neither, cut it.
When I applied Vonnegut’s rule to the script of my opening routine, the results were devastating. Most of what I said on stage did neither. It did not reveal my character — who I am, what I think, what I believe, what I find funny or strange or important. And it did not advance the action — it did not move the story forward, create tension, raise stakes, or push toward a resolution.
What did most of my patter do? It narrated. It described what was happening. “I’m going to ask you to select a card.” “Notice that I haven’t touched the deck.” “Remember, you had a completely free choice.” These sentences are the script equivalent of a sports announcer describing what the audience can already see. They serve a function — they manage the audience’s attention and establish fairness — but they do not reveal character or advance action. By Vonnegut’s standard, they are filler.
And most magic scripts are almost entirely filler.
This was a hard thing to confront. I had put real work into my scripts. Hours in hotel rooms, writing and rewriting, testing lines at events across Austria, adjusting and refining. But the work had been focused on clarity and procedure — making sure the audience understood what was happening and believed the conditions were fair. I had never asked whether my words revealed anything about me or moved a story forward.
The Three Dots in Practice
Let me walk through the exercise more completely, because the mechanics matter.
You start with a bare description of the effect. Keep it simple. One sentence. Do not embellish. Do not add presentation elements. Just the raw effect as the audience would describe it.
“A prediction written before the show matches a word freely chosen by the audience…”
Then the three dots. And then you write. Stream of consciousness. No editing, no judgment, no stopping to think about whether what you are writing is good or usable or even makes sense. Just follow the thought wherever it goes.
“…which means either I can predict the future — which I obviously cannot — or something about the way we think makes our choices less random than we believe. And if our choices are less random than we believe, then prediction isn’t magic at all. It’s pattern recognition. It’s the same thing I do as a strategy consultant when I walk into a company and tell them what’s about to happen to their market. I don’t predict the future. I read the patterns that are already there. So maybe this isn’t a magic trick. Maybe it’s the same thing I do every day for a living, stripped down to its simplest form.”
Look at what happened. The three dots took me from a description of an effect to a thematic connection between my magic and my consulting career. That connection was always there — I am a consultant who performs magic, and the skill sets genuinely overlap — but I had never articulated it. It was implicit, buried, invisible. The three dots made it explicit.
And that explicit connection is presentation gold. It is the kind of insight that transforms a generic prediction effect into something that feels personal, specific, and authentic. It is the kind of insight that makes an audience lean forward and think, “This person is not just performing a trick. This person is showing me something about how their mind works.”
The Discovery Sessions
After that first evening, I turned the three dots exercise into a regular practice. Every week, I would pick one routine from my repertoire and run it through the exercise. Sometimes I did it in hotel rooms during consulting trips. Sometimes I did it at my desk at home in Austria. The location did not matter. The blank page and the willingness to follow the thought mattered.
Each session produced different results. Some sessions generated material I used immediately — a new opening line, a thematic frame, a connection to my personal story that I had not noticed before. Other sessions produced nothing usable but deepened my understanding of what the routine was about. And a few sessions produced something I did not expect at all: they revealed that a routine was not worth performing.
One routine in particular went through the three dots exercise and came out the other side exposed. The description: “I apparently read someone’s mind and reveal a thought they have never spoken…” The three dots: “…which is impressive, I suppose, but what does it mean? Why should the audience care that I can do this? The effect is strong but the experience is empty. There is no story here. There is no theme. There is no reason for this routine to exist in my show other than that it’s technically good and gets a reaction.”
That was a painful thing to write. The routine was one I had worked hard on. The method was elegant. The reactions were genuine. But the three dots revealed that I had no deeper connection to the material. I was performing it because I could, not because it mattered. And that absence of meaning, I realized, was detectable by the audience — not consciously, not explicitly, but in the subtle way that separates a routine the audience remembers from a routine the audience forgets.
I cut that routine from my show two weeks later and replaced it with something I cared about more deeply. The replacement was technically simpler, but it connected to a real story from my consulting career, and the three dots exercise had revealed a rich vein of meaning that I could mine for presentation material. The upgrade was not in skill. The upgrade was in intention.
What Lives Behind the Three Dots
After dozens of these sessions, I noticed a pattern. The material that emerges after the three dots falls into a few categories.
First, there are thematic connections. The effect connects to something larger — a human experience, a psychological principle, a philosophical question. These connections are the raw material for presentations that mean something beyond “watch this.”
Second, there are personal connections. The effect connects to something in my life — a memory, a relationship, a professional experience, a moment of discovery. These connections are the raw material for presentations that feel authentic and specific rather than generic.
Third, there are audience connections. The effect connects to something the audience cares about — their work, their relationships, their fears, their aspirations. These connections are the raw material for presentations that feel relevant rather than merely entertaining.
And fourth, there are contradictions. The effect raises a question that contradicts itself — if I can really do this, then what? If I cannot really do this, then what does it mean that it appears to work? These contradictions are the raw material for presentations that create genuine intellectual engagement, the kind that keeps the audience thinking long after the show is over.
The Vonnegut Filter
After the three dots exercise generates raw material, I apply Vonnegut’s filter. I go through my existing script, sentence by sentence, and ask: does this reveal character or advance the action? Every sentence that does neither gets flagged.
Then I look at the raw material from the three dots exercise and ask: which of these ideas could replace the flagged sentences? Which thematic connections, personal connections, audience connections, or contradictions could take the place of narration and procedure?
The result is a script that does more. Every sentence pulls double or triple duty. A line that previously only managed procedure now manages procedure while also revealing something about who I am. A line that previously only narrated the effect now narrates the effect while also advancing a thematic argument. The script becomes denser — not in the sense of being packed with words, but in the sense of being packed with meaning.
Let me give a small example. Before the exercise, a moment in one of my routines went something like: “I want you to think of any word. It can be anything at all.” After the exercise: “I want you to think of a single word — the first word that comes to your mind. Not the second word. Not the edited version. The first one. Because the first thought is always the honest one, and every thought after that is a negotiation.”
Same procedural function. Same effect on the trick. But the second version reveals character (I believe that first thoughts are honest and that we negotiate with ourselves), advances the thematic argument (this routine is about honesty and self-editing), and creates a micro-moment of recognition in the audience (everyone knows the experience of editing their first thought).
The Practice
I have made the three dots exercise a permanent part of my creative process. Every new routine goes through it before I finalize the script. Every existing routine goes through it at least once a year, because I change — my experiences accumulate, my perspectives shift, my consulting work exposes me to new ideas — and those changes create new material behind the three dots.
The exercise takes about twenty minutes. It requires a blank page, an honest description of the effect, and the willingness to follow your own thoughts past the obvious and into the territory where real meaning lives. It is free. It requires no special skill. And it has produced more useful creative material than any other exercise I have encountered in my years of studying performance craft.
Three dots. An ellipsis. The typographical equivalent of “and then what?” It is the simplest creative tool I know, and the most powerful. Because the magic that matters — the magic that audiences remember, the magic that changes how people think about what they just experienced — that magic does not live in the effect. It lives behind the three dots, waiting for you to keep writing.