I was backstage at a corporate event in Vienna — “backstage” meaning a hallway behind a velvet curtain that smelled faintly of catering — when the event coordinator asked me a question that nobody had ever asked me before.
“So how did you learn to do this? The mind-reading thing?”
She was being polite, making conversation while we waited for the room to fill. But the question stopped me. Not because it was difficult, but because I realized I had two answers. The real answer was: I read books, watched videos, practiced in hotel rooms, studied psychology, and spent hundreds of hours developing routines. The performance answer — the one my character should have on stage — was: nothing. I had no performance answer. My character had no origin story. My magic came from nowhere, appeared for no reason, and existed without explanation.
I mumbled something about always being fascinated by human behavior, which was true enough but not a story. She smiled and moved on. I stood in that hallway and thought about the fact that I had spent over a year developing routines, scripts, and presentations, and had never once considered the most basic narrative question of all: where does the magic come from?
The Question Every Audience Asks
Pete McCabe addresses this directly in Scripting Magic, drawing on David Regal’s framework of Power, Premise, and Presentation. The insight is that every magic routine implicitly answers three questions for the audience, whether the performer addresses them or not: What is the magical power being demonstrated? What is the premise under which this power operates? And what is the presentation — the specific dramatic frame — through which the power is shown?
Most performers, McCabe argues, focus exclusively on the third question. They think about presentation — the jokes, the patter, the staging, the music. Some think about the first question — the power is mind reading, or prediction, or telekinesis, or whatever the effect demonstrates. Almost nobody thinks about the second question: the premise. The why. The backstory.
But the audience thinks about it. Not consciously, not analytically, but in the instinctive way that human beings process narrative. When someone demonstrates an extraordinary ability, the audience automatically wonders: how did they get this ability? When did they discover it? Is it natural or learned? Is it reliable or unpredictable? These are the questions that turn a demonstration into a story, and if the performer does not answer them, the audience fills in the gaps with whatever seems most likely — which is usually: it is a trick, and the performer is good at tricks.
That default interpretation — “it’s a trick” — is the enemy of wonder. And it fills the vacuum left by missing backstory.
Michael Close’s Question
There is a question attributed to Michael Close that McCabe references, and it became my guiding principle for this entire area of development: “Every trick you want to do, the first question is: what does this trick mean to me?”
When I first read this, I interpreted it as a question about emotional connection. Do I care about this routine? Am I passionate about it? Those are valid interpretations. But the deeper meaning — the one that took weeks to settle in — is about narrative origin. What does this trick mean to me implies a relationship, and relationships have beginnings. If the trick means something to me, there must be a reason it means something. There must be a story behind the meaning. There must be a backstory.
The backstory is not the trick’s history (who invented it, when it was published, which performer made it famous). The backstory is my history with the trick. How did I come to possess this ability? Why do I demonstrate it? What is my relationship to this particular expression of impossibility?
The Backstory Audit
I went through every routine in my show and asked two questions. First: where does the magical power come from? Second: why does this specific person — me, Felix, a strategy consultant from Austria who performs magic in corporate keynotes — have this power?
For my mentalism pieces, the first question was relatively easy to answer. The power comes from understanding human psychology — reading body language, understanding decision patterns, applying principles of behavioral economics. This backstory worked because it was partly true. I genuinely study psychology. I genuinely apply behavioral principles in my consulting work. The backstory was a slightly exaggerated version of a real skill set, which made it believable.
For my card routines, the first question was harder. Where does the power come from when a card appears in an impossible location? This is not a psychological skill. This is not an extension of consulting. This is something that defies physical reality, and the backstory needs to account for that defiance without exposing the method.
I struggled with this for days. I tried several approaches. The supernatural approach: “I’ve always had a strange relationship with playing cards.” This felt dishonest and did not match my persona. I am not a mystical performer. I am a consultant who wears a nice shirt and speaks in complete sentences. Claiming supernatural abilities would clash with everything else about my character.
The scientific approach: “There are principles of physics and probability that most people don’t know about.” This felt closer but was too vague. It did not tell a story. It made a claim without providing a narrative.
The personal approach: “I discovered something while practicing alone in hotel rooms — a way of paying attention to things that most people overlook.” This was the one that landed. It was true enough to be believable. It connected to my real practice habits. It suggested a skill rather than a power, which matched my persona. And it created intrigue: what does he pay attention to? What is he seeing that we are not?
The Layers of Backstory
What I discovered through this process is that backstory operates on multiple levels, and you do not need to explain all of them on stage. Some backstory is explicit — you tell the audience directly. Some is implicit — it is suggested by your behavior, your confidence, your relationship with the props. And some is internal — it exists only in your head, informing your performance without ever being stated.
The explicit layer is the simplest. A single sentence in the script that addresses where the ability comes from. “Years ago, I read a research paper about the predictability of human choice” — that is explicit backstory for a prediction routine. It takes five seconds, it provides a narrative origin, and it makes the audience think about the routine in terms of psychology rather than trickery.
The implicit layer is subtler and more powerful. If you behave as though your ability is real — if you handle the props with the casual confidence of someone who has done this a thousand times, if you react to the results with genuine interest rather than theatrical surprise, if you treat the magic as a natural extension of who you are — the audience receives a backstory without being told one. They infer that this person has a long history with this ability, that it is real to them, that it is part of their identity. The implied backstory is more persuasive than the stated one, because the audience believes what they observe more than what they are told.
The internal layer is the one that surprised me most. When I developed backstories for my routines — even the backstory elements that never appeared in the script — my performances changed. Knowing where my character’s abilities came from gave me a richer emotional landscape to perform from. I was not just executing a trick. I was demonstrating a skill that I had discovered, developed, and refined over years. The internal backstory gave me conviction, and conviction is the most important quality a performer can have.
The Consulting Firm Backstory
Let me describe one specific backstory I developed, because the process illustrates how backstory creation works in practice.
I have a mentalism routine where I apparently determine information that a spectator is thinking about. The routine was already strong — the effect was clean, the reactions were consistent — but it felt clinical. Technical. Like a demonstration of ability rather than a moment of connection.
I built a backstory around my consulting career. Not the magic. The consulting. The idea: in my work as a strategy consultant, I spend my days reading people. Reading boardrooms. Reading the unspoken dynamics between executives who agree publicly and disagree privately. Over years, I developed an ability to detect what people are thinking based on how they behave — micro-expressions, word choices, breathing patterns, the way someone holds their coffee cup when they are nervous.
This backstory is not entirely fictional. I genuinely do read rooms in my consulting work. Every good consultant does. The backstory takes a real skill and extends it into the realm of magic — suggesting that my ability to read people is simply more developed, more refined, more precise than the audience expects.
On stage, I share one piece of this backstory. One sentence. “In my other life — the one that pays the bills — I read people for a living. Strategy consulting is essentially professional mind-reading, except the clients are allowed to lie.” The audience laughs. They now have a backstory for my ability: this person reads people as part of their job, and what we are about to see is an extreme version of that professional skill.
The rest of the backstory never appears in the script, but it informs everything. My confidence comes from years of professional observation. My calm demeanor comes from thousands of boardroom readings. My willingness to be wrong comes from the consulting experience of sometimes misreading a room and having to adapt. All of this is implied, never stated, and the audience absorbs it through my behavior.
The Vacuum Problem
The reason backstory matters so much is the vacuum problem. In the absence of a provided backstory, the audience creates their own. And the audience’s default backstory is almost always: this is a trick, the performer has practiced it extensively, and the apparent impossibility is actually a technique.
That default backstory is accurate, of course. But it is also the least engaging interpretation of what they are watching. A performer executing a well-practiced technique is admirable but not magical. A person demonstrating a genuine ability that they discovered, developed, and brought into the world — that is a story. That is compelling. That is the kind of backstory that makes an audience lean forward rather than lean back.
The backstory does not need to be elaborate. It does not need to be the centerpiece of the presentation. A single sentence can do the work. But that single sentence — the one that answers where the power comes from — changes the audience’s interpretation of everything that follows.
The Practice
Here is the exercise I now do for every new routine. Before writing the script, before rehearsing the handling, I sit in whatever hotel room or home office I happen to be in, and I write answers to three questions:
Where does the magical power in this routine come from? Not “sleight of hand” or “a gimmick” — those are methods. I am asking about the narrative origin. In the world of the performance, what enables me to do what I am about to do?
Why does this specific person — me, with my specific background and personality — have this power? The answer must connect to something authentic about who I am. If the backstory could belong to any performer, it is not specific enough.
What are the limitations of this power? This one is counterintuitive, but limitations make abilities believable. If I can do anything, the audience does not believe any of it. If I can do this specific thing under these specific conditions with this specific level of reliability, the ability feels real. The limitations are part of the backstory.
I write the answers in my notebook. Most of the material never appears in the final script. But the process of thinking through the backstory gives me a narrative foundation that supports everything I build on top of it.
The event coordinator in Vienna was right to ask how I learned to do this. It was the most natural question in the world. And the fact that I did not have a compelling answer — the fact that my magic came from nowhere, existed for no reason, and had no story behind it — was a problem I had been carrying for over a year without knowing it.
Now every routine in my show has a backstory. The audience rarely hears more than a sentence of it. But that sentence fills a vacuum that would otherwise be filled with the least interesting explanation possible. And in magic, as in consulting, the story you tell about where you come from determines how seriously people take where you are going.