The previous post made the case for why procedural patter is a problem. This post is about what you do about it.
Let me be direct: you will never eliminate procedural patter entirely. Magic involves procedures. Cards need to be shuffled. Objects need to be examined. Volunteers need to be given instructions. Some amount of procedural communication is unavoidable.
The goal is not zero. The goal is as close to zero as you can get. Every word of procedure that you eliminate is a word that could be replaced by something meaningful — something that entertains, connects, or builds the experience. The ratio matters. The higher the ratio of meaningful content to procedural content, the better the performance.
Pete McCabe, across both volumes of Scripting Magic, returns to this principle again and again. He calls it economy of words. Eugene Burger calls it the elimination of non-moments. I call it the most underrated skill in all of magic performance.
The Three Categories of Necessary Procedure
Not all procedure is equal. I have found it useful to separate procedural communication into three categories based on how necessary it actually is.
Category one: truly necessary instructions. These are lines the audience or a volunteer literally cannot do without. “Think of any card” is procedural, but it is necessary — the volunteer needs to know what to do. “Please hold out your hand” is procedural, but the volunteer cannot comply without the instruction. These lines stay. They are the irreducible minimum.
Category two: unnecessary narration of your own actions. “I’m going to shuffle the cards.” “Let me place this on the table.” “I’ll turn this card face up.” These are the lines that describe what the audience can see. The audience does not need to be told. These lines go. All of them.
Category three: instructions that could be replaced by gesture. “I’d like you to look at this card” could be replaced by extending the card toward the volunteer with an expectant look. “Watch this closely” could be replaced by a deliberate pause and a shift in your own attention toward the object. Gesture is silent procedure. It communicates the instruction without wasting words. These lines should be converted to physical action wherever possible.
When I applied this categorization to my scripts, I found that category one accounted for about twenty percent of my procedural patter, category two about fifty percent, and category three about thirty percent. Eliminating category two and converting category three to gesture cut my total word count dramatically and opened up enormous space for meaningful content.
Replacing Dead Words with Living Ones
The space created by eliminating procedural patter is the most valuable real estate in your performance. Here is how I fill it.
With anticipation. Instead of narrating the action (“I’m going to turn this card over”), build the moment (“This is the part I’ve been thinking about all evening”). The action happens visually. The anticipation happens verbally. The audience now has two things to process — what they see and what they feel about what they see.
With context. Instead of describing the procedure (“Let me count these cards”), provide the frame (“If what I suspect is true, then something very strange should have happened to these cards”). The counting still happens. But now the counting has meaning. The audience is not watching you count. They are watching to see if your suspicion is correct.
With character. Instead of announcing your intentions (“I’m going to try to find your card”), reveal something about yourself (“This is the moment where I usually get nervous, because if I’m wrong, there’s no way to recover”). The audience learns something about you as a person while the procedure unfolds in the background. The human moment takes precedence over the mechanical one.
With humor. Instead of filling dead space with narration, fill it with something that makes the audience laugh or smile. A well-placed joke during a procedural moment transforms the procedure from dead time into entertainment. McCabe notes that Jamy Ian Swiss argues a joke at the right moment covers the worst procedural flaw in a trick — the audience is too busy laughing to notice the procedure at all.
With silence. Sometimes the best replacement for procedural patter is nothing at all. Silence builds tension. Silence communicates confidence. Silence gives the audience space to think and feel. Silence says: I do not need to fill every second with words because I trust that the experience I am creating is strong enough to hold your attention without narration.
The Instruction Compression Technique
For the procedural instructions that must remain — the category one lines — I use a technique I think of as instruction compression. The goal is to communicate the necessary information in the fewest possible words, with the warmest possible tone, and then immediately move to meaningful content.
Instead of: “I’d like you to think of any card in the deck. It can be any card at all. Just picture it in your mind. Have you got one? Good.”
Compressed: “Think of a card.” Then immediately: “Don’t tell me. I want you to hold onto it. Let it be your secret for a moment.”
The instruction — think of a card — takes three words. Everything after that is meaningful content: building anticipation, establishing intimacy, creating the sense that something private and important is happening.
The difference in time is negligible. The difference in experience is enormous. The first version treats the instruction as the main event. The second version treats the instruction as a gateway to the experience.
The Physical Solution
One of the most effective ways to reduce procedural patter is to design your effects so that less verbal procedure is needed. This is a design principle, not just a scripting principle.
If a trick requires the audience to follow a complex set of instructions, the problem may not be with your script but with the trick itself. A well-designed effect should be intuitively clear. The audience should understand what is happening from the physical actions alone, without needing a verbal roadmap.
Darwin Ortiz, in Designing Miracles, emphasizes that the audience’s experience of impossibility depends on their understanding of the initial and final conditions. If the effect is designed well, the physical actions should communicate both conditions clearly. The audience should be able to see what they started with and see what they ended up with, and the gap between the two should be self-evidently impossible.
If you need twenty words of instruction to establish the initial condition, the design may need work. If the audience can see and understand the initial condition from the physical setup alone, you have freed yourself from the need to narrate it.
I have redesigned several effects in my repertoire specifically to reduce the amount of verbal instruction required. In each case, the redesign made the effect not only more efficient to perform but more powerful in impact, because the audience was processing the impossibility through direct observation rather than through my verbal description.
The Audience Instruction Problem
The most challenging procedural patter to eliminate is the kind directed at volunteers. Volunteers need to know what to do. They have never been in this situation before. And if you do not give them clear instructions, the performance can go sideways.
I handle this through what I call layered instruction — giving the volunteer information in stages rather than all at once.
Instead of front-loading all the instructions (“I’m going to hand you this card and I’d like you to hold it face down without looking at it until I tell you, and when I snap my fingers I want you to turn it over and show it to the audience”), I break it into sequential steps.
Step one: “Hold this.” I hand them the card. Physical action plus two words.
Step two, after they are holding it: “Don’t look yet.” Four more words, delivered with a smile.
Step three, at the appropriate moment: “Now. Turn it over.” Five words. The audience sees the result.
Each instruction arrives at the moment it is needed, not before. The volunteer never has to remember a complex sequence. The audience never sits through a block of procedural setup. And the spaces between instructions can be filled with meaningful content — building anticipation, engaging the volunteer personally, connecting with the broader audience.
Measuring Your Ratio
Here is a practical exercise. Take your best routine — the one you perform most often and feel most confident about. Record yourself performing it. Transcribe every word.
Then mark each line with one of two labels: P for procedural (describes a visible action, gives an instruction, narrates a process) or M for meaningful (builds anticipation, reveals character, creates context, delivers humor, connects emotionally).
Calculate your ratio. How many P lines versus M lines?
When I first did this exercise, my ratio was roughly sixty percent procedural, forty percent meaningful. I was horrified. The majority of my words were doing nothing for the audience’s experience.
After reworking the script — eliminating category two patter, converting category three to gesture, compressing category one, and filling the reclaimed space with meaningful content — the ratio flipped. Roughly thirty percent procedural, seventy percent meaningful. The routine was shorter by about two minutes. The audience response was significantly stronger.
I now apply this exercise to every new routine I develop. The script goes through multiple passes specifically focused on identifying and eliminating procedural content. Each pass makes the script leaner, sharper, and more impactful.
The Standard
McCabe quotes Al Baker: “Most magicians stop thinking too soon.” I think this applies directly to procedural patter. Most performers accept their procedural lines as necessary without questioning whether they really are. They stop thinking at “the audience needs to know what I’m doing” when they should push further to “does the audience really need me to tell them this, or can they see it for themselves?”
Every word you say during a performance is a choice. Every choice has a cost — it costs the audience’s attention. Every cost should produce a return — entertainment, meaning, connection, anticipation.
Procedural patter costs attention and produces no return. That is why it must be minimized. Not eliminated entirely — some procedure is genuinely necessary. But taken as close to zero as you can get.
The standard I hold myself to is this: if I can cut a line and the audience loses nothing, the line goes. If I can replace a line with gesture and the audience gains clarity, the gesture replaces the words. If I can compress an instruction into fewer words, I compress it. And every word that survives the cut must earn its place by doing something meaningful.
The goal is a performance where every word matters. Where the audience listens because listening is rewarded. Where the silence between words is as purposeful as the words themselves.
Take procedural patter as close to zero as you can. What remains will be worth hearing.