There is a line from Michael Close, quoted in Pete McCabe’s Scripting Magic, that I have returned to more than almost any other single sentence in my entire study of magic. Close says: “I always love it when there’s a little bit of truth to the lie. That’s all you need. I just need enough truth that I believe it.”
When I first read that, I was sitting in a hotel room in Linz after a long day of consulting work, trying to figure out why one of my mentalism routines felt hollow even though it fooled everyone. The method was solid. The script was polished. But something about it rang false. Not to the audience — they responded fine. To me. And I had been performing long enough to know that if something rang false to me, it would eventually ring false to them too.
Close’s line gave me the diagnosis. My script was entirely fictional. Every word of it was constructed to serve the method, and none of it was true. The audience could not detect the lie specifically, but they could sense the absence of truth. The whole thing had the texture of a performance — too smooth, too perfect, too removed from anything real.
The Architecture of Believable Deception
Here is what I have come to understand about scripts, presentations, and the words we say during a performance: the most convincing deception is not one that replaces reality entirely. It is one that sits inside reality, surrounded by truth, with only the smallest deviation from what is actually happening.
Think about it from the audience’s perspective. When everything a performer says is theatrical and constructed, the audience enters a mode of polite suspension of disbelief. They know it is a performance. They play along. They enjoy it, perhaps. But they do not believe it at a deep level because nothing about it feels real. There is no anchor in the real world.
But when most of what you say is true — when you are genuinely sharing something about yourself, about the situation, about the object in your hand — and only one element is untrue, the audience has no reason to doubt anything. The truth creates a context of credibility. The lie, nestled inside that context, becomes invisible.
This is not a new insight. Con artists have known it for centuries. The best deceptions are ninety percent truth. The lie works precisely because everything around it is real.
How I Rebuilt a Routine Around This Principle
Let me give you a practical example without revealing anything that would expose a method.
I had a routine where I talked about the history of a particular object I was using. The history was entirely invented — a dramatic story about where the object came from and what it meant. It sounded good on paper. It had narrative arc, conflict, resolution. All the structural elements a good story should have.
But it was fiction, and at some level I think the audience could feel that. Not because the facts were wrong — they had no way of checking — but because the way I told it lacked the texture of real memory. When you describe something that actually happened to you, your voice changes. Your eyes change. You pause in different places. You include odd, specific details that no one would invent. A fabricated story, no matter how well constructed, tends to be too clean, too linear, too perfectly shaped.
So I rebuilt it. I kept the parts of the story that were actually true — where I bought the object, what I was doing at the time, what I thought when I first saw it. These were genuine memories, and when I talked about them, they sounded genuine because they were. Then I changed one element. One small fact that served the effect, that made the impossible moment more impossible, that gave the audience a reason to believe the magic was real.
The difference was immediate. Not in the audience’s reaction to the magic itself — that stayed about the same — but in how they responded to me as a person telling them something. Before, they were watching a performance. After, they were listening to someone share a real experience. And when the impossible moment arrived, it landed differently because it arrived inside a story they believed.
Why Truth Creates Better Lies
There is a psychological principle at work here that goes beyond magic. When humans evaluate whether something is true, they do not assess every claim independently. They assess the overall impression. If most of what someone says checks out — if their tone is consistent, their details are specific, their emotional affect matches the content — the listener extends a blanket of credibility to everything that is said. Individual claims inherit the credibility of the whole.
This is why testimonials work in advertising. This is why the most effective misinformation is wrapped in factual reporting. And this is why the most powerful presentations in magic are the ones that are mostly true.
The reverse is also true. When a performer delivers a presentation that is entirely scripted, entirely constructed, entirely disconnected from their actual experience, the audience can feel the artifice even if they cannot identify it. The blanket of credibility never forms. Every claim is evaluated on its own, and none of them has the weight of genuine experience behind it.
The Personal Connection Problem
Michael Close, in the same interview McCabe conducted, makes another point that I think is even more important: “Every trick you want to do, the first question you have to ask is: what does this trick mean to me?”
This question terrified me when I first encountered it. Because the honest answer for most of the tricks in my repertoire was: nothing. I was performing them because they were good tricks. Because the methods were elegant. Because I had seen other performers do them well and wanted to do the same.
None of that gives you a little bit of truth to build a lie around.
The hard work — and it is genuinely hard work, harder than learning any sleight — is finding a personal connection to every effect you perform. Not a fabricated connection. A real one. What does this trick mean to you? What does it remind you of? What experience in your life does it echo?
For me, the breakthrough came when I started thinking about the objects I use in my performances not as props but as things I actually own. I bought most of them. They sat on my desk or in my travel bag. Some of them were gifts from Adam when we started Vulpine Creations. Some of them I picked up in shops in Vienna or Graz because something about them caught my eye before I had any idea I would ever use them in a performance.
Those real connections became the truth. And around that truth, I could build a single strategic lie that made the magic possible.
The Spectrum of Honesty in Performance
I think about presentations now on a spectrum from fully honest to fully fictional, and my goal is to stay as far toward the honest end as I can while still accomplishing what the effect requires.
At one end, you have performances where everything the performer says is true except for the method. The story is real. The emotions are real. The objects are what they appear to be. Only the mechanism by which the impossible happens is hidden. This is the strongest form of magic because the audience has no fictional framework to disbelieve. They are in the real world, and something impossible just happened in the real world.
In the middle, you have performances with a mixture of real and constructed elements. A real story with an invented detail. A genuine emotion attached to a constructed scenario. These work well as long as the real elements outweigh the constructed ones and provide the anchor of believability.
At the other end, you have fully theatrical presentations where everything is constructed — character, story, setting, emotional arc. These can be wonderful entertainment, but they are not the same kind of magic. They exist in a theatrical space where the audience has already agreed to pretend, and the impossible moment therefore has less impact because it arrives inside a frame that is already acknowledged to be fictional.
I am not saying one approach is objectively better than another. Fully theatrical magic has produced some of the greatest performances in the history of the art. But I am saying that for my own work — as someone who performs in corporate settings, at keynote events, for people who did not necessarily come to see a magic show — the closer I stay to truth, the more powerful the magic becomes.
How to Find Your Truths
If you are trying to apply this principle, here is the process I use.
First, I take the effect and strip away all presentation. Just the bare effect: what the audience sees happen. A prediction is correct. An object vanishes. A thought is read. Whatever it is.
Then I ask myself: has anything in my actual life ever reminded me of this? Have I ever experienced something that felt like a prediction coming true? Have I ever lost something in a way that felt impossible? Have I ever known what someone was thinking before they said it?
The answer, always, is yes. Because magic effects are based on universal human experiences. We have all felt the uncanny. We have all had moments of impossible coincidence. We have all known things we should not have known.
Those real moments become the foundation of the presentation. I tell the true story. I describe the true feeling. And then the magic happens inside that frame of truth, and the audience does not experience it as a trick. They experience it as a demonstration that the world is stranger than they thought.
The Lie That Serves the Truth
Here is the paradox that I keep coming back to. In magic, the lie serves the truth. The one false element — the hidden method — exists to create an experience of genuine wonder. And that wonder is true. The audience really does feel astonished. They really do experience a moment where the impossible seems possible. That feeling is not a lie. It is the most real thing in the room.
So when Close says he needs just a little bit of truth to believe the lie, I think he is describing something deeper than a scripting technique. He is describing the fundamental architecture of meaningful magic. A foundation of truth. A single strategic deception. And an experience that transcends both.
I think about this every time I sit down to script a new piece. What is true here? What do I actually feel about this? What real experience does this connect to? And once I have found the truth, I ask: what is the smallest lie I need to tell to make the impossible happen?
The smallest lie. That is the key. Not the most dramatic lie, not the most theatrical lie, not the most impressive lie. The smallest one. Because the smaller the lie, the more truth surrounds it. And the more truth surrounds it, the more the audience believes everything.
A little bit of truth to the lie. That really is all you need.