I was reading Pete McCabe’s Scripting Magic when I encountered a detail about Penn and Teller’s creative process that stopped me mid-paragraph. Not because it was complicated. Because it was the opposite of what I had been doing for years.
Penn and Teller write the script after rehearsal, not before.
They rehearse the physical routine first. They work out the staging, the timing, the blocking, the visual beats. They discover what the routine wants to be through physical exploration. And only then — once the body of the piece exists — do they write words to serve what they found.
Most performers, including me, do it the other way around. We start with the script. We write what we want to say, figure out where the magical moments go, and then rehearse the physical routine to match the words. The script is the blueprint. The performance is the building.
Penn and Teller treat the physical performance as the blueprint and the script as the finishing work. And there is a reason their shows run for decades in Las Vegas while most magic acts struggle to fill a weekend at a local theater.
Why I Had It Backwards
My background made me naturally script-first. I am a strategy consultant. My entire professional life is built on frameworks, plans, and documents. When I decided to build a thirty-minute show, the first thing I did was open a document and start writing. What would I say? What stories would I tell? How would I frame each effect?
I spent weeks writing scripts for routines I had barely rehearsed physically. I crafted transitions between effects I had never actually performed in sequence. I wrote jokes for moments I had never tested in front of a real audience.
The scripts were good, as pieces of writing. They read well on paper. The stories were coherent. The transitions were logical. The pacing, on the page, seemed right.
But when I started rehearsing with those scripts — when I began performing the physical actions while saying the words — everything fell apart. The timing was wrong. A line I had written to cover a particular moment came too early or too late. A joke that was funny on paper was impossible to deliver while also managing a prop. A beautiful story arc required the audience’s attention at exactly the moment when the physical routine needed me to direct their attention somewhere else.
I was fighting my own material. The words and the actions were working against each other because they had been designed separately, in different media, by different parts of my brain. The writer in me had created one performance. The performer in me was trying to deliver another. And they did not agree on what the show was.
The Discovery of Physical Truth
What Penn and Teller understand — and what took me much longer to learn — is that a performance has a physical truth that can only be discovered through physical rehearsal. The rhythm of handling objects, the natural pauses created by physical actions, the moments where the audience’s attention is pulled by visual interest — all of these exist independently of any script. They are properties of the performance as a physical event.
When you script first, you impose a verbal rhythm on a physical event that has its own rhythm. The result is either awkward (the words fighting the actions) or artificial (the actions being distorted to serve the words).
When you rehearse first and script second, you discover the physical rhythm and write words that serve it. The script becomes a companion to the action rather than its master.
I first tested this approach with a card routine I had been struggling to script. I had written three different versions of the patter, none of which felt right. The words sounded good in isolation but clumsy when combined with the handling.
So I abandoned the scripts entirely. I went into my hotel room in Graz, set up my phone camera, and performed the routine in silence. No patter. No jokes. No stories. Just the physical actions, the gestures, the timing of the visual moments.
I watched the video back and something immediately became clear. The routine had natural pauses — moments where the action waited for a beat before continuing. It had natural climaxes — moments where the visual impact was strongest. It had a natural rhythm that was completely different from the rhythm I had imposed with my written scripts.
I watched the video three more times, noting where the pauses were, where the climaxes fell, where the routine seemed to want words and where it seemed to want silence. Then I wrote a script that fit those moments. Not the other way around.
The difference was immediate. The words flowed with the actions instead of against them. The jokes landed at moments where the physical routine naturally provided a comedic setup. The story beats aligned with the visual beats. For the first time, the piece felt like one thing rather than two things awkwardly layered on top of each other.
The Consultant’s Mistake
I think about why I had this backwards, and I realize it connects to a professional habit that serves me well in consulting but poorly in performance.
In consulting, the plan precedes the execution. You analyze, strategize, and document before you implement. The framework comes first. The action follows. This makes sense in business because business decisions have high costs and need to be thought through before resources are committed.
But performance is not business. In performance, the body knows things the mind does not. The physical reality of standing on a stage, holding a prop, moving through space, facing an audience — all of this generates information that no amount of planning can anticipate.
Darwin Ortiz makes a related point about method serving effect, not the other way around. The method must conform to the demands of the effect, not the reverse. Applied to scripting, this means: the script must conform to the demands of the performance, not the reverse. And the demands of the performance can only be discovered through rehearsal.
I had been trying to make my performances conform to my scripts. Penn and Teller make their scripts conform to their performances. That is the correct hierarchy.
What Physical-First Rehearsal Reveals
When you rehearse without a script, you notice things that are invisible on paper.
You notice that certain actions take longer than you thought. The act of dealing cards to a table has a rhythm that eats up three seconds you did not budget for. If you have a scripted line intended to cover that moment, it either has to be padded or rushed, neither of which sounds natural.
You notice that certain moments are visually compelling enough to stand on their own. A card slowly turning over. A prediction envelope being opened. These moments do not need words. In fact, words diminish them. Silence at those moments is more powerful than any script could be, because the audience is processing visual information and adding narration competes with that processing.
You notice where the routine breathes. Every physical sequence has moments of higher and lower energy. The high-energy moments demand attention. The low-energy moments allow the audience to relax. A good script mirrors this energy curve. A script-first approach often imposes a verbal energy curve that contradicts the physical one.
You notice where humor naturally lives. There are moments in any physical routine that are inherently funny — an exaggerated gesture, an unexpected outcome, a pause that gets slightly too long. These are the moments where jokes land best. Script-first writing places jokes where the writer thinks they should go. Physical-first rehearsal reveals where the performance says they should go.
My Adapted Process
I have not fully adopted the Penn and Teller approach. My process is a hybrid, informed by their method but adapted to my reality as someone who performs within keynote speeches rather than in dedicated magic shows.
My current process has four stages.
First, I select or create the effect and learn the method thoroughly. I practice the handling until it is automatic. This stage is purely technical and involves no scripting at all.
Second, I perform the routine silently on video. Multiple takes. I watch each one and note the physical rhythm — where the pauses are, where the visual peaks land, where the energy rises and falls.
Third, I write a script that serves the physical reality I discovered. The words go where the routine wants them. Silence goes where the routine wants silence. Jokes go where the routine naturally offers comedic potential.
Fourth, I rehearse the combined script and physical routine together, adjusting both until they feel like a single integrated piece. This is where fine-tuning happens — a word moved here, a pause extended there, a gesture simplified to make room for a line.
This process takes longer than script-first writing. But the results are incomparably better. Every piece I have developed this way feels more natural, more cohesive, and more audience-friendly than anything I wrote the old way.
Why Most Performers Script First
It is worth thinking about why the script-first approach is so common, because understanding the trap helps avoid it.
Most performers script first because writing is comfortable and rehearsing is uncomfortable. Writing happens at a desk, in private, at your own pace. Rehearsing happens on your feet, often in front of a mirror or camera, and it confronts you with the gap between what you imagined and what you can actually deliver. Writing lets you be brilliant in theory. Rehearsing forces you to be competent in practice.
There is also a cultural bias in the magic community toward verbal cleverness. Magicians admire a great line, a brilliant joke, a clever turn of phrase. They share scripts. They discuss patter. The verbal dimension of performance receives far more attention and respect than the physical dimension. This creates an incentive to invest in the script first because that is what your peers will notice and praise.
But the audience — the people who actually matter — do not read your script. They experience your performance. And the performance is a physical event first and a verbal event second.
The Lesson Beyond Magic
The principle here extends well beyond magic performance, and it connects to something I have observed in every creative field I have worked in.
The best keynote speakers I know do not write their speech and then rehearse it. They develop their talk through delivery — standing up, speaking out loud, discovering what works and what does not through the physical act of presenting. The written version comes later, refined by the spoken version.
The best product designers I have worked with do not finalize the design on paper and then build a prototype. They build quick prototypes first, discover what the physical object wants to be, and then refine the design to match.
The principle is the same in every case: physical reality teaches you things that abstract planning cannot. The plan should serve the discovered reality, not the other way around.
Penn and Teller have been performing together for decades. Their show is one of the longest-running in Las Vegas history. They are, by any reasonable measure, among the most successful live performers in the world. And their process puts physical discovery before verbal design.
That is not a coincidence. That is a methodology.
What I Do Now
These days, when I am developing a new piece for a keynote or a corporate event, the first thing I do is not write. The first thing I do is perform.
I stand in my hotel room, or in my apartment in Vienna, or in whatever space is available, and I work through the physical routine in silence. I feel where the natural pauses are. I notice where the visual moments land. I discover the rhythm that the routine generates on its own.
Then I sit down and write.
And the scripts that come from this process are better than anything I have ever produced at a desk with nothing but my imagination. They are better because they are built on truth — the physical truth of the performance, the experiential truth of the audience’s journey, and the artistic truth that words should serve the moment, not create it.
Penn and Teller figured this out decades ago. I am still learning it. But every time I trust the process — every time I resist the urge to script first and instead let the performance teach me what it wants to say — the result is a piece that feels alive in a way that desk-written scripts never do.
The words come last. The performance comes first. And that order makes all the difference.