I was stuck. It was late 2019, and I was trying to build a new segment for my show. I had been performing the same material for long enough that it felt stale to me, even if audiences still seemed to enjoy it. I wanted something fresh, something that felt more like me and less like a trick I had learned from a tutorial.
The problem was that I only knew one way to generate act ideas: find a trick I liked, then figure out how to present it. Start with the effect, work outward. This is how most performers I know approach the creative process. You see someone perform something that amazes you, or you buy a new effect that excites you, and you build around it.
It works. Sometimes. But it is a single source, and single sources dry up. When you rely on finding exciting tricks as your only wellspring of creativity, you end up in a cycle of purchasing and imitating rather than creating.
Then I read Fitzkee’s framework, and everything opened up.
The Nine Sources
In Showmanship for Magicians, Fitzkee lays out nine distinct starting points for building an act. Not nine types of tricks. Nine types of ideas. The distinction matters enormously because it shifts the creative process from “What trick should I do?” to “What idea should I express?”
I will walk through all nine, and for each, I will share what happened when I actually tried to use it as a starting point.
Source One: Character Type
This is the idea of building an entire act around a character. Not a trick with a character layered on top, but a character that determines everything — what you do, how you do it, what materials you use, how you speak, how you react when things go wrong.
Fitzkee lists several examples from his era: the slightly tipsy gentleman (Cardini), the bumbling amateur (Ballantine), the shy Cockney (Peter Godfrey). Each of these performers did not start with tricks and add character. They started with a character and found tricks that served it.
When I tried this approach, I asked myself a simple question: Who am I on stage? Not who do I want to pretend to be. Who am I? A consultant who stumbled into magic. An analytical mind encountering wonder. Someone who is still genuinely surprised by what is possible.
That character — the intelligent outsider who takes this stuff seriously precisely because he came to it late — became a lens for everything. It did not generate specific tricks, but it generated criteria. Any effect that required me to play the all-knowing wizard did not fit. Any effect that allowed for genuine surprise, for discovery, for the sense that we were figuring something out together — that fit perfectly.
Source Two: A Particular Trick
This is the starting point most of us default to. You find a great trick and build around it. Fitzkee does not dismiss this approach, but he treats it as one of nine, not the only option.
The risk with starting from a trick is that you end up showcasing an effect rather than creating an experience. The trick becomes the destination rather than a vehicle. I have caught myself doing this many times — falling in love with a particular effect and forcing it into my show without asking whether it serves the larger arc.
Source Three: A Type of Trick
Subtly different from Source Two. Instead of starting with a specific trick, you start with a category. All card effects. All mentalism. All productions. All vanishes. Ade Duval built his “Rhapsody in Silk” act entirely from silk productions. The type of trick became the unifying principle.
I experimented with this when I put together a short set that was entirely mentalism-based. No cards, no visual magic, just mind-reading and prediction effects. The constraint was liberating. With the type decided, I could focus entirely on presentation, pacing, and emotional arc within a unified framework.
Source Four: A Particular Object or Material
Build your act around a single prop or material. Everything involves ropes. Everything involves coins. Everything involves paper. The unity comes from the object itself, which the audience grows familiar with and develops expectations about.
This is something I have never fully explored, but I find the idea fascinating. There is a purity to it. The audience sees the same object transform, multiply, vanish, and reappear throughout the performance. Their familiarity with the object actually deepens the magic, because they feel they understand the prop — and then you shatter that understanding.
Source Five: A Theme or Subject
Build the act around an idea rather than a trick. The theme of luck. The theme of memory. The theme of trust. The theme of the impossible becoming possible. The tricks are chosen because they illustrate the theme, not because they are individually impressive.
This is the source that resonated most strongly with my keynote work. When I perform magic as part of a business presentation, the theme comes first. If the keynote is about innovation, every effect I include needs to express something about seeing possibilities that others miss. If it is about leadership, the effects need to involve the audience in ways that demonstrate trust and collaboration.
Starting from a theme forced me to evaluate my material differently. Some of my best tricks — technically, emotionally, visually — did not fit certain themes. And some simpler effects that I had been overlooking turned out to be perfect because their meaning aligned with the message.
Source Six: A Musical Composition or Song
Let the music drive the act. Choose a piece of music and build the performance to fit its rhythm, mood, and emotional arc. Fitzkee argues that music is one of the most underutilized tools available to magicians, and starting from the music rather than adding it later is one way to unlock its full potential.
I tried this once with a rope routine. I had been performing it with patter — talking through each phase, explaining what was happening. Then I heard a particular piece of music while driving between meetings in Graz, and something about its rhythm matched the physical movements of the routine. I stripped out all the talking, set the routine to the music, and performed it silently.
The result was transformative. The audience’s attention shifted from my words to the visual poetry of the movements. The music carried the emotional weight. The routine went from being a demonstration of skill to being a performance piece — something closer to dance than to a trick demonstration.
Source Seven: A Comedy Situation
Start with something funny. Not a trick with a joke added, but a comedic situation that happens to involve magic. The magician whose tricks go wrong. The performer who cannot find his props. The mentalist who reads a volunteer’s mind and discovers something embarrassingly mundane.
Fitzkee makes a sharp observation here: there is no more helpless, hopeless, or totally demoralized performer in the theater than a magician whose tricks have gone wrong. And nothing delights an audience more. The magician-in-trouble angle is a comedy goldmine precisely because the audience expects competence and gets chaos.
I use a version of this in my corporate shows. There is a moment where something appears to go sideways — where the effect seems to fail, and I seem genuinely stuck. The comedy comes from the situation, not from a punchline. And when the trick resolves in a way the audience did not expect, the relief and surprise combine into a reaction that is bigger than either would have been alone.
Source Eight: A Dramatic Situation
The opposite of comedy: start with tension, danger, or high stakes. An escape from a locked container. A prediction that will be proved right or wrong in front of everyone. A demonstration where real consequences seem possible.
Dramatic situations are harder for me to pull off in a keynote context, but they work beautifully in standalone shows. The key is genuine stakes — or at least the appearance of genuine stakes. The audience needs to believe that something could go wrong, that the outcome is uncertain, that the performer is taking a real risk.
Source Nine: Perverse Magic
This was the source that surprised me most. Fitzkee credits Charles Waller with the concept of “Perverse Magic” — objects that do what they please, defying not just physics but the performer’s own intentions. The magician tries to make the ball go into the right cup, and it goes into the wrong one. The card refuses to cooperate. The rope has a mind of its own.
What makes perverse magic brilliant is that it creates a three-way relationship: the performer, the audience, and the prop. The prop becomes a character. The audience roots for the prop, or for the performer, or shifts allegiance back and forth. There is conflict built into the structure — the performer wants one thing, the object wants another — and conflict is the engine of entertainment.
Why Most Performers Use Only One or Two
Looking at this list, I realized I had been drawing almost exclusively from Sources Two and Five — specific tricks and themes. That is not unusual. Most performers I know operate the same way. They find tricks they like and, if they are thoughtful, they organize them around a theme.
But Sources One, Six, Seven, and Nine were almost completely unexplored in my work. Character as a starting point. Music as a starting point. Comedy situations. Perverse magic. Four entire creative wellsprings that I had been ignoring.
The Combinatorial Explosion
Here is what gets really interesting: these nine sources are not mutually exclusive. You can combine them. A character-driven act (Source One) built around a comedy situation (Source Seven) using a particular type of trick (Source Three) set to music (Source Six). That is four sources working together, and the result is something far richer and more original than any single source would produce.
When I started deliberately combining sources, the creative process accelerated. Instead of staring at a blank page wondering what to perform, I had a grid of possibilities. Character plus theme. Music plus perverse magic. Dramatic situation plus a single material. Each combination opened a new door.
The Exercise That Changed My Approach
I created a simple exercise for myself. I wrote each of the nine sources on a separate card. Before starting to develop any new piece, I would draw two or three cards at random and force myself to use those sources as starting points. The randomness broke my habits. It pushed me into creative territory I would never have entered voluntarily.
One combination was “Musical Composition” and “Perverse Magic.” I ended up developing a piece where a prediction seemed to have a mind of its own, set to a piece of music that shifted tone as the prediction kept defying my expectations. It was unlike anything else in my repertoire, and it came directly from the collision of two sources I would never have combined deliberately.
From Consumer to Creator
The deepest shift Fitzkee’s nine sources created in my thinking was this: I stopped being a consumer of tricks and started being a creator of performances. When your only source of ideas is “find a good trick,” you are dependent on the magic market — on dealers, on creators, on what happens to be available. You are a consumer.
When you have nine sources, most of which are internal — your character, your theme, your sense of humor, the music that moves you, the dramatic situations that fascinate you — you become a creator. Your raw material is not a prop catalog. It is your imagination, your life experience, and your willingness to combine ideas in ways nobody else would.
Fitzkee wrote this list in 1943. Eighty years of magic innovation have not made it obsolete. If anything, the explosion of available tricks has made it more important. There are more effects available today than any performer could master in a lifetime. The bottleneck is not tricks. The bottleneck is ideas.
Nine sources. I had been using two. The other seven were sitting there the whole time, waiting to be discovered. If you are stuck creatively — and every performer gets stuck — do not go shopping for a new trick. Go shopping for a new source.