I keep a box in my apartment in Vienna. It is not an impressive box — just a cardboard file box from an office supply store, the kind you buy to archive old invoices. But what is inside it tracks my entire evolution as a performer in a way that no journal, no video recording, and no performance diary ever could.
It contains every script I have ever written for a magic routine. The earliest ones are printed on hotel stationery from various cities across Europe, scrawled in the rushed handwriting of someone trying to capture an idea before it evaporated. The most recent ones are neatly typed, refined, tested, and annotated with performance notes.
When I lay them out in chronological order, a pattern emerges that I did not see while I was living through it. The scripts do not just get better over time — they change in kind. The type of writing shifts in a way that, looking back, falls into five distinct stages. And the more I read about creative development in other fields, the more I am convinced these stages are not unique to me. They are universal.
Austin Kleon writes in Steal Like an Artist that every creative person moves through a progression from copying to original creation. He traces this idea through T.S. Eliot, through Jim Jarmusch, through the entire history of artistic development. And when I mapped his creative progression onto my box of scripts, the match was almost embarrassingly precise.
Stage One: Copying Verbatim
The earliest scripts in my box are not scripts at all. They are transcriptions. I would watch a tutorial video from ellusionist.com, and if the performer said something during the trick, I would write down exactly what they said and try to memorize it. Word for word. Inflection for inflection. Sometimes I even noted their pauses.
This is the stage most people are ashamed of. It feels derivative. It feels unoriginal. It feels like cheating. But looking back, I am convinced it is the most important stage of all, because it is where you learn that words matter.
Before I started copying other performers’ scripts, I had no script at all. I would shuffle cards in silence, or mumble something vague like “pick a card, any card” without any sense of rhythm, timing, or purpose. The act of copying — even slavishly copying — taught me that what you say during a trick is not incidental. It is structural. It shapes the experience.
The problem with this stage is not that you are copying. The problem is that you are performing someone else’s personality. Their jokes, their rhythms, their word choices — they reflect who that person is, not who you are. I once performed a routine using the exact script from a tutorial video, and a friend who had seen the same video said, “That was good, but you sounded exactly like that guy on YouTube.” He was right. I was ventriloquizing someone else’s voice.
But I needed to do that before I could find my own.
Stage Two: Adapting Others’ Scripts
The next batch of scripts in my box shows the first signs of independence. They are still based on other performers’ words, but I have started changing things. A joke that did not feel natural in my mouth got replaced with one that did. A cultural reference that made sense for an American audience got swapped for something that would land in Vienna. A personality-driven line that only worked if you were loud and extroverted got rewritten for someone quieter.
This is the adaptation stage, and Pete McCabe devotes significant attention to it in Scripting Magic. Every script in his book includes an “Adaptation” section — practical guidance on how to personalize material. His insistence is clear: you should never perform someone else’s script unchanged. Adaptation is not optional; it is the process of making a trick yours.
What I found during this stage was that adaptation is harder than it looks. The temptation is to change the easy things — swap a reference here, adjust a joke there — while keeping the deep structure intact. But the deep structure often carries the original performer’s personality just as much as the surface details do. Their pacing, their rhythm of escalation, the way they build tension — all of it reflects their temperament, not yours.
The real work of adaptation is not changing words. It is changing structure. And that requires understanding why the original script works, not just what it says.
Stage Three: Combining Elements
This is where the box gets interesting. Around the time I started working seriously on material for Vulpine Creations with Adam, my scripts began to show a new pattern. Instead of adapting a single source, I started pulling elements from multiple sources and combining them.
An opening from one performer’s routine. A structural idea from a completely different effect. A closing line I had heard in a keynote speech that had nothing to do with magic. A question format I borrowed from a corporate facilitation technique I used in my consulting work.
These Frankenstein scripts were messy. Some of them were genuinely terrible — stitched together from incompatible parts, with tonal shifts that would give you whiplash. But the ones that worked had something the earlier scripts lacked: they sounded like me. Not like any single influence, but like the specific collision of all my influences.
Kleon describes this perfectly: “You are a mashup of what you let into your life.” At Stage Three, you start to see the mashup take shape. You are no longer copying one voice or adapting one script. You are building something from parts that only you would have combined, because only you have your specific collection of inputs.
The danger of this stage is incoherence. When you combine elements from different sources, the result can feel disjointed — like a playlist with no throughline. The antidote is what McCabe calls the “one thing”: each routine should communicate one clear idea, and every element must serve that idea. When I started applying that filter to my combination scripts, the bad ones fell apart immediately (they had no single idea holding them together) and the good ones became sharper.
Stage Four: Original Creation with Borrowed Structure
This is where I am for most of my current repertoire, and I suspect it is where many experienced performers live for most of their careers.
At this stage, the words are entirely mine. The jokes, the anecdotes, the specific lines — they come from my own experience, my own personality, my own sense of humor. But the underlying structure is borrowed. The architecture of the script follows patterns I have learned from studying other performers and from reading about dramatic structure.
I know that a routine needs a hook in the first fifteen seconds. I know that tension should escalate in stages. I know that the reveal should be preceded by a beat of anticipation. I know that the closing line should echo something from the opening. These are structural principles I absorbed from McCabe, from Ortiz, from studying comedy construction, from watching hundreds of performances.
The words are mine. The blueprint is inherited. And I am comfortable with that, because the blueprint is what makes the words effective. The structural principles belong to centuries of theatrical tradition, codified by people like McCabe and Ortiz and refined by generations of performers. Your originality lives within those structures — in the specific words you choose, the specific stories you tell, the specific personality you bring to the inherited form.
Stage Five: Pure Creation
I have a few scripts in the box that belong to this stage. Not many. Maybe four or five out of several dozen. They are the ones where both the words and the structure emerged from the material itself, where I did not consciously apply any inherited pattern but let the routine find its own form.
These are the pieces I am proudest of. They are also the pieces that took the longest to develop — months of testing, revising, performing, and revising again. They do not follow conventional dramatic structure. They do not echo patterns I learned from anyone else. They have their own internal logic, their own rhythm, their own architecture.
I would love to tell you that Stage Five is simply a matter of enough practice and enough time. But I do not think that is true. I think Stage Five happens when a specific routine and a specific performer reach a level of mutual understanding that cannot be forced. The routine teaches you its own structure, if you listen carefully enough and perform it enough times.
Not every routine gets there. Most of my repertoire lives comfortably at Stage Four, and I am fine with that. Stage Four produces excellent, professional, personal work. Stage Five is rare and unpredictable, and chasing it for every routine would be both impractical and self-defeating.
Why Every Stage Is Necessary
The reason I am writing about this progression is not to suggest that Stage Five is the goal and everything else is a stepping stone. It is to argue the opposite: every stage is necessary, and trying to skip stages produces worse results than moving through them honestly.
I have met performers who refuse to copy anyone — they want to be original from day one. The result is usually formless, undisciplined work that has passion but no structure. They skipped the stages where you learn what structure is.
I have met performers who never move past Stage Two — they spend their entire careers adapting other people’s material without ever combining sources or creating their own. Their work is competent but generic. It has structure but no personality.
And I have met performers who try to leap from Stage One directly to Stage Five — from copying to pure creation, with nothing in between. The result is usually pretentious and self-indulgent, because they have not done the intermediate work of learning why existing structures exist.
The progression is not a hierarchy of value. It is a sequence of education. Each stage teaches you something that the next stage requires. Copying teaches you that words matter. Adaptation teaches you that personality matters. Combining teaches you that inputs matter. Structured creation teaches you that architecture matters. And pure creation, when it comes, teaches you that some routines have their own inner life that you can discover but not impose.
Tracking Your Own Progress
If you are developing material right now, here is a diagnostic exercise. Take three routines from your current repertoire and classify each one by stage:
Stage One — you are performing someone else’s script essentially unchanged.
Stage Two — you have adapted someone else’s script to fit your personality and context.
Stage Three — you have combined elements from multiple sources into something new.
Stage Four — your words are original but your structure follows learned patterns.
Stage Five — both your words and your structure emerged organically from the material.
There is no shame in any answer. If all three are at Stage One, that is fine — it means you are early in the process and you are building a foundation. If all three are at Stage Four, that is also fine — it means you have found a sustainable creative method that produces personal, professional work.
The only wrong answer is dishonesty. Telling yourself you are at Stage Four when you are actually at Stage Two — performing adapted material while believing it is original — prevents growth. And telling yourself you should be at Stage Five when you are at Stage Three — beating yourself up for not being more creative — prevents enjoyment.
Know where you are. Do the work of that stage fully. And trust that the next stage will arrive when you are ready for it, not when you demand it.
The box of scripts in my Vienna apartment tells a story I could not have written in advance. It tells the story of a consultant who bought a deck of cards in a hotel room and, word by word, script by script, stage by stage, learned to speak in his own voice. That process is still ongoing. It will always be ongoing. And that, I have come to believe, is the point.