There was a line I could not let go of.
I had been studying a mentalism routine by a performer I admired — watching recordings, reading the script, analyzing the structure. The routine was elegant, the method was clean, and the presentation was built around a concept that resonated deeply with me. But there was one specific line, about two-thirds of the way through, that I was obsessed with. It was a throwaway comment, almost. The performer said it casually, as if it had just occurred to him, and it reframed the entire preceding sequence in a way that made the audience gasp.
I wanted that line. I wanted it the way you want a beautiful sentence in a novel — not just to appreciate it but to own it, to have it in your mouth, to deliver it and feel the audience react.
So I built my adaptation of the routine around that line. I changed the opening. I changed the spectator interaction. I changed the closing. But I kept that line — word for word, inflection for inflection — because it was the thing I loved most about the original.
And the adaptation failed. Not slightly. Comprehensively.
I performed it at a corporate event in Vienna, and the line — my precious line — landed with a soft thud. No gasp. No reframing. Just a mild look of confusion from the spectator and polite but tepid reactions from the rest of the table. The line that had been devastating in the original performer’s hands was meaningless in mine.
It took me weeks to understand why, and the answer changed how I think about adaptation entirely.
The Line Was Not the Line
The line worked in the original routine because of everything that preceded it. The original performer had spent two minutes building a specific expectation in the audience’s mind — a specific understanding of what was happening and why. The line worked because it shattered that specific expectation. It reframed a specific narrative that the audience had been carefully guided to construct.
In my adaptation, I had changed the opening, the interaction, and the buildup. Which meant the audience had constructed a different expectation. A different narrative. And when I delivered the line, it was answering a question nobody had asked. It was reframing a story nobody had been told.
The line was not a standalone unit of brilliance. It was a structural payoff that derived all of its power from a specific structural setup. Without the setup, the payoff was gibberish.
Pete McCabe makes this principle explicit in Scripting Magic: adaptation is not about preserving the lines you love. It is about understanding the structure that makes those lines work and then rebuilding that structure with your own lines.
This distinction — between lines and structure — is the single hardest concept in adaptation, because our emotional attachment is almost always to the lines. We remember lines. We quote lines. We admire lines. Structures are invisible. They do their work in the background, shaping the audience’s experience without being noticed. Nobody walks out of a show saying, “That was a brilliant three-act structure with escalating impossibility and a callback to the opening premise.” They walk out saying, “That line about the psychologist was incredible.”
But the line about the psychologist was incredible because of the three-act structure with escalating impossibility and a callback to the opening premise. Remove the structure and keep the line, and you have nothing.
The Stripping Process
After my Vienna failure, I developed a process that I now apply to every adaptation. I call it stripping to the structure, and it is exactly as painful as it sounds.
Step one: write down the original script in full. Every line, every pause, every stage direction, every spectator interaction.
Step two: identify every line you love. Circle them. Star them. Highlight them in bright yellow. These are the lines your emotional brain wants to keep.
Step three: delete every one of them.
This is the painful part. You are deliberately removing the things that attracted you to the material in the first place. It feels wrong. It feels like you are taking a beautiful painting and scraping off all the paint, leaving only the canvas.
But that is exactly the point. The canvas is the structure. And the canvas is what you need.
Step four: with the lines removed, map what remains. You will see the architecture — the sequence of emotional beats, the pattern of questions and reveals, the rhythm of tension and release. You will see where the audience’s expectations are set, where they are confirmed, and where they are violated. You will see the bones of the routine without the flesh.
Step five: rebuild the flesh with your own lines. Write new jokes that hit the same structural beats. Write new transitions that serve the same architectural functions. Write new payoff lines that satisfy the same emotional needs that the original payoffs satisfied.
What you end up with is a routine that feels different from the original — it sounds like you, it reflects your personality, it references your experiences — but works the same way structurally. It hits the same emotional beats in the same order with the same timing. The audience experiences a similar journey, but through your voice, not the original performer’s.
Why This Is So Hard
I will be honest: I still struggle with this. The temptation to preserve a beloved line is almost irresistible.
Part of the difficulty is ego. When you find a line that is brilliant, keeping it feels like evidence of your good taste. “I recognized this brilliance,” your ego whispers. “I should be able to deploy it.” But recognizing brilliance and deploying brilliance are completely different skills. A line that works in someone else’s mouth, in someone else’s context, with someone else’s rhythm, may be genuinely brilliant — and still be completely wrong for you.
Part of the difficulty is fear. Writing your own lines is scarier than borrowing proven ones. A line that has already worked for another performer feels safe. It has a track record. Your own lines are untested. They might fail. Keeping the original line feels like insurance against failure.
And part of the difficulty is simply that lines are concrete and structures are abstract. You can hold a line in your mind. You can rehearse it. You can feel it in your mouth. A structure is invisible. It is a pattern, a relationship between parts. You cannot rehearse a structure the way you rehearse a line. You can only trust that if you build new lines on the same structural foundation, they will work.
This trust is hard-won. It comes from experience — from stripping scripts down to their structure enough times, rebuilding them with your own material enough times, and seeing the rebuilt versions work enough times that you believe in the process.
The Michael Close Test
Michael Close, in his interview in Scripting Magic, offers a question that I have found invaluable for testing whether an adaptation is truly yours: “What does this trick mean to me?”
If your answer references the original performer’s experience, the original performer’s perspective, or the original performer’s specific ideas, the adaptation is not complete. You are still living in someone else’s structure and someone else’s meaning.
If your answer references your own experience, your own perspective, and your own ideas — even though the structural architecture was borrowed — then the adaptation has succeeded. You have made the material yours.
I apply this test now before I perform any adapted material. I sit with the script and ask myself Close’s question. If I cannot answer it without thinking about the original performer, I know I have more work to do. Usually, the work that remains is precisely the work of stripping out remaining lines that belong to the other performer and replacing them with lines that belong to me.
A Concrete Example
Without revealing any methods, let me describe how this process played out with a specific routine.
I was adapting a card routine that I had seen performed with a narrative about a con artist. The original performer told a story about a fictional card sharp who had cheated at poker in the American West, and the routine’s phases paralleled episodes in the con artist’s career. It was beautifully constructed. And there was a line near the end — something about the con artist’s downfall — that gave me chills every time I watched it.
First strip: I removed the con artist narrative entirely. It was quintessentially American. An Austrian consultant telling a story about poker in the American West is not just inauthentic — it is absurd. Adam, my partner at Vulpine Creations, would have laughed me off the stage.
What remained was the structure: three phases of escalating impossibility, each framed as an episode in a story, leading to a final phase where the premise inverts. That was the architecture. That was the canvas.
I rebuilt it with a narrative drawn from my own world — strategy consulting. Instead of a con artist, the story became about the illusion of certainty in business decisions. Each phase paralleled a stage of a consulting engagement where things appeared to be under control but were not. The final inversion — where the premise flipped — became about the moment when a client realizes their assumptions were wrong from the beginning.
The line I had loved — the one about the con artist’s downfall — had no place in this new narrative. It was specific to a world I was not part of and a story I was not telling. Instead, I wrote a line about the moment of realization — that feeling when the spreadsheet you trusted turns out to be built on flawed data. It is a completely different line, referencing a completely different world, but it occupies the same structural position and serves the same emotional function: it reframes everything that came before.
And it works. It works in front of Austrian corporate audiences because it draws from a world they know. It works in my mouth because it draws from my actual experience. And it works structurally because the architecture — the three-phase escalation with a final inversion — is preserved.
The Universal Principle
This is not just a magic principle. It is a creative principle that applies everywhere I have tested it.
In my consulting work, I often adapt frameworks from other consultants. The mistake I see junior consultants make is the same one I made with magic scripts: they fall in love with the specific slides, the specific phrases, the specific examples, and try to use them verbatim with different clients. It never works, because the specifics belong to the original context.
What works is understanding the structure of the framework — the logical sequence, the diagnostic flow, the pattern of analysis and recommendation — and rebuilding it with examples and language specific to the new client’s industry, culture, and challenges.
In both cases, the lesson is the same: the lines are not the value. The structure is the value. The lines are merely one possible expression of the structure, and they are inseparable from the personality, context, and specific intentions of the person who wrote them. When you try to transplant lines from one context to another, they wither like a plant pulled from its native soil.
When you transplant structure and let it grow new lines in new soil, it thrives.
Strip to the structure. Let the lines go. Write your own. It is harder and scarier and more uncertain than keeping someone else’s beautiful words. But it is the only adaptation that actually works.