After I understood that timing is about intention rather than speed — that it is the deliberate control of tempo to achieve a specific emotional objective — I needed something more concrete. Understanding the philosophy was essential. But philosophy alone does not tell you what to do with your hands, your voice, and your body in the moment before a reveal.
What I needed were rules. Not rigid prescriptions that eliminate creativity, but practical guidelines that give structure to the instinct. The kind of rules you internalize through practice until they become reflexive, so your conscious mind can focus on the audience while your subconscious handles the mechanics of delivery.
Dariel Fitzkee provided exactly that in Showmanship for Magicians. His timing rules are specific, practical, and immediately applicable. I have distilled them into five principles that I now apply to every routine in my set, and I want to walk through each one with the detail it deserves.
Rule One: Build Gradually
Each trick should start at a normal conversational tempo and gradually slow toward its conclusion. Each successive trick in your set should start slightly slower than the one before it and slow more at its climax. The overall effect across the entire performance is a gradual deceleration, building weight and significance as the show progresses.
This feels counterintuitive at first. You would think that building excitement means building speed. More energy, more pace, more forward momentum. But Fitzkee understood something about human psychology that I verified through my own performing experience: audiences interpret increasing speed as increasing urgency, but they interpret decreasing speed as increasing importance.
When you slow down, you are telling the audience that each moment matters more than the last. You are creating the sensation of approaching something significant. Think about how a film score works in the moments before a major revelation. The music does not get faster. It gets slower, lower, more deliberate. The silence between notes expands. The audience leans forward not because the pace is driving them forward but because the deceleration signals that the destination is near.
In my own set, I used to start every routine at roughly the same tempo. Now I am deliberate about the starting tempo of each piece. The first routine begins at a brisk, conversational pace. The second begins slightly slower. The third slightly slower still. By the time I reach my closing routine, I am starting at a pace that would have felt sluggish if I had used it at the beginning of the show. But after thirty minutes of gradual deceleration, it feels exactly right. It feels weighty. It feels like arrival.
Rule Two: Slow Toward the Climax
Within each routine, the tempo should decelerate as you approach the climactic moment. Not abruptly — gradually, continuously, like a ball rolling uphill. The setup can be delivered with energy and pace. The development can move at a moderate tempo. But as you approach the reveal, the deceleration should be unmistakable.
I practice this literally. In my hotel room, I will run through a routine with a timer, noting how many seconds I spend on each phase. Then I deliberately stretch the final phase. Where I might naturally deliver the final sixty seconds of a routine in sixty seconds, I will stretch it to eighty or ninety. Not by adding words — by adding space between words. By slowing my physical movements. By letting my voice drop in both speed and volume.
The effect on the audience is profound. The deceleration creates the physical sensation of approaching something. It is the narrative equivalent of a camera zoom — the audience’s focus narrows as the pace slows, until all attention is concentrated on a single point. The climactic moment arrives with all of that concentrated attention bearing down on it, and the impact is proportionally greater.
A reveal delivered at the same pace as the setup feels like just another thing that happened. A reveal delivered at the end of a deliberate deceleration feels like the thing everything was building toward.
Rule Three: Pause Before the Point
This is the most powerful of the five rules, and the one that took me the longest to learn. Fitzkee’s guideline is specific: pause two to three seconds after each important phrase, and pause almost twice as long — four to six seconds — just before the phrase establishing the main point.
Six seconds of silence on stage feels like an eternity. The first time I tried it, performing a mentalism prediction at a corporate event in Vienna, I chickened out. I managed about two seconds before the discomfort of the silence drove me to fill it with words. The audience did not seem to notice anything wrong. But I knew I had blinked.
The next time, I forced myself to hold the full pause. I had been building toward the reveal — the moment when the prediction would be opened and compared to the choices the volunteer had made. Everything pointed to this moment. The deceleration was in place. And then, instead of immediately moving to the reveal, I stopped. I looked at the audience. I did not say anything. I did not move. I just stood there, holding the envelope, making eye contact, letting the silence expand.
Three seconds in, I could feel the tension in the room change. The audience was not uncomfortable — they were anticipating. Their attention had sharpened to a point. They were leaning forward, physically and emotionally. Four seconds. Five seconds. The room was so quiet I could hear someone shift in their chair.
Then I opened the envelope. And the reaction was significantly stronger than any time I had done the same effect without the pause. Not because the effect was more impressive. Because the pause had built up a reservoir of anticipation that the reveal then released all at once.
The pause works because it creates a gap in the flow of information. The audience’s mind, denied new input, fills the gap with expectation. Their theories crystallize. Their emotional investment deepens. And when the information finally arrives — the reveal, the punchline, the climax — it crashes into a mind that has been primed by six seconds of concentrated anticipation.
I now treat the pre-reveal pause as sacred. It is the single most important moment in any routine, and it contains no words, no actions, no magic. Just silence. And that silence does more work than any sentence I could write.
Rule Four: Accelerate Through Transitions
If the rule for climactic moments is to slow down and pause, the rule for transitions is the opposite: move quickly. The moments between effects — the setup for the next piece, the logistical business of getting a prop into position or a volunteer seated — should be handled with brisk efficiency.
This is not about rushing. It is about recognizing that transitions are not climactic moments and should not be treated as such. The audience’s attention naturally dips during transitions. They know that the current moment is not the main event. If you linger in that space, the dip deepens. If you move through it quickly and purposefully, the audience stays engaged because they can feel the next climax approaching.
I think of transitions like the fast sections of a piece of music — the passages that carry you from one theme to the next without asking you to dwell on them. They serve a structural function. They are necessary. But they should not draw attention to themselves. They should feel like forward motion, like the show is going somewhere, like the next important moment is imminent.
Practically, this means I have rehearsed my transitions as carefully as I have rehearsed the effects themselves. I know exactly where every prop lives. I know exactly what I will say during each transition. I know exactly how to get a volunteer from their seat to the stage in the minimum amount of time without making them feel rushed. The transitions are tight, purposeful, and fast — not because I am hurrying but because the architecture of the show demands that the non-climactic moments be efficient so the climactic moments have room to breathe.
Rule Five: Never Rush a Reveal
This is the corollary to rules two and three, and it is the rule I see violated most often — by myself and by every other performer I watch. The temptation to rush the reveal is almost irresistible. You have built the tension. You have slowed the tempo. You have paused before the point. And now the moment is here, and you are excited, and the audience is excited, and every instinct in your body says: do it now, fast, rip the bandage off, let them see.
Resist. The reveal should be the slowest moment in the entire routine. Not laboriously slow — deliberately slow. Every action clear, every gesture visible, every beat given its full measure of time.
When I open a prediction envelope, I do not tear it open. I open it slowly, visibly, making sure every person in the room can see what I am doing. When I turn over a card, I do not flip it. I turn it over with deliberate control, letting the image emerge gradually. When I speak the words that confirm the prediction, I speak them at half the speed I would use in normal conversation, with a pause between each phrase.
The reason is simple: the reveal is the moment the audience has been waiting for. If you rush it, you steal from them the experience of watching the impossible become real in real time. You compress the most important moment into a fraction of a second, and the audience does not have time to fully absorb what they are seeing. They get the information — the prediction matches — but they do not get the experience. The experience requires time. It requires the slow unfolding of impossibility, witnessed at a pace that allows the full weight of the moment to register.
I learned this the hard way at an event in Salzburg, where I had a strong prediction effect that I was rushing through the reveal because my adrenaline was high. The audience reacted well, but the reaction was brief. One burst of surprise, and then it was over. Watching the video afterward, I timed the reveal at less than two seconds. Two seconds for the climax of a seven-minute routine. It was disproportionate. The setup had taken minutes. The climax took moments. The audience’s emotional payoff was proportional to the time I gave the reveal, not the time I gave the setup.
Now I aim for the reveal to take ten to fifteen seconds. In those seconds, I unfold the prediction, display it, let the audience read it, look at the volunteer, look at the audience, let the realization spread through the room. Those fifteen seconds are the most carefully choreographed seconds of the entire routine. Every gesture is planned. Every beat is deliberate. And the reaction is consistently, measurably stronger than when I rushed the same effect.
How the Five Rules Work Together
The five rules are not independent. They are a system. The gradual build (rule one) creates the macro-trajectory. The deceleration toward the climax (rule two) creates the micro-trajectory within each routine. The pause before the point (rule three) creates the moment of maximum anticipation. The accelerated transitions (rule four) maintain forward momentum between climactic moments. And the unhurried reveal (rule five) delivers the payoff with the weight it deserves.
Together, they create a tempo architecture that the audience feels but never consciously analyzes. The experience of watching a set built on these rules is one of being carried — smoothly, inevitably, with constantly deepening engagement — toward a destination that feels both surprising and inevitable when it arrives.
The Practice Protocol
In my hotel room rehearsals, I now practice timing explicitly. I perform routines with a metronome app on my phone, not to keep time but to measure my tempo at different points in the routine. I check: am I actually slowing down toward the climax, or do I just think I am? Am I actually pausing for the full duration, or am I cutting it short? Am I actually accelerating through transitions, or am I lingering?
The metronome does not lie. And what I discovered, when I first started measuring, is that my perceived deceleration was much smaller than I thought. I believed I was slowing down significantly toward the reveal. In reality, I was slowing down by perhaps ten percent. Not enough for the audience to feel. When I deliberately doubled the deceleration, it felt exaggerated to me but looked natural on video.
This is a common problem. What feels dramatic from the inside looks subtle from the outside. The performer’s internal experience of tempo change is always larger than the audience’s external perception. So the adjustments need to be bigger than they feel. The pauses need to be longer than feels comfortable. The deceleration needs to be more pronounced than feels natural.
It feels wrong in the hotel room. It looks right on stage. Trust the rules. Trust the video. Do not trust your internal sense of timing, because the adrenaline and self-consciousness of performance distort your perception of time in ways that only external measurement can correct.
Fitzkee gave these rules to magicians in the 1940s. Ralphie May gave similar advice to comedians sixty years later. The context changes. The rules do not. Build gradually. Slow toward the climax. Pause before the point. Accelerate through transitions. Never rush the reveal.
Five rules. Simple to understand. Difficult to master. Worth every hour of practice you invest in them.