There’s a hotel room I think about more than any other.
I couldn’t tell you the name of the hotel anymore — one of a dozen I stayed in regularly in those years — but I can tell you that it was in Graz, third floor, with a window that looked onto a rooftop across a narrow gap. The radiator ran loud. There was a desk that was too close to the wall to sit at comfortably, so I always spread on the bed instead. November, late, a pot of tea going cold on the nightstand. I had a deck of cards and a laptop and that was essentially the whole world.
I can tell you all of that because when I started doing what Matthew Dicks recommends — finding one story-worthy moment per day and writing it down — I also started paying attention to where I was when those moments happened.
The location turned out to be more important than I understood at the time.
The Cinema Principle
Dicks makes a specific observation about storytelling that sounds almost too simple when you first encounter it: when you tell a story, you should immediately establish a physical location, as specifically as possible.
Not “at a hotel.” A hotel room in Graz, third floor, November.
Not “in a meeting with a client.” A conference room in the Erste Campus in Vienna, afternoon, the kind of corporate building where the light is always slightly wrong.
Not “one time at a show.” Backstage in a function venue in Salzburg, thirty minutes before I walked out, in a corridor next to the catering area.
The reason is almost neurological. When you give a listener a specific physical location, their brain doesn’t just receive information — it builds a space. It constructs a room. It places you in that room and starts rendering the environment. The listener is no longer sitting where they’re sitting; they’re somewhere else, watching your story happen.
Without the specific location, the listener’s brain has nothing to build with. It stays in the abstract. The story remains information rather than experience.
The Test I Failed For Years
I know this principle is right because I tested its opposite for years without knowing it.
When I talked about my learning experiences in early performances and keynote segments, I used vague locations by default. Not because I didn’t remember where things had happened — often I did — but because I assumed specificity was self-indulgent. Who cares whether it was Graz or Linz? Who cares what floor? I was stripping out the location details because they seemed like unnecessary noise.
The effect was that my stories, even when they were genuinely interesting experiences, felt slightly flat. They existed in a generic, unrendered space that audiences couldn’t inhabit. They could follow the logic of what I was saying — they understood that something had happened — but they couldn’t be there.
An audience that can’t be there is an audience that’s listening from outside the story. They’re evaluating it rather than living it. When they’re evaluating, they’re less emotionally engaged, which means the principles I’m trying to illustrate through the story land with less force.
Dicks’ insight solved a problem I’d been experiencing for years without knowing what caused it.
Why Specificity Signals Truth
There’s a secondary effect that matters a great deal in performance: specific locations signal that something actually happened.
When I say “one time I was practicing late at night,” the listener has no particular reason to believe this is a real memory. It could be. It might be something I’m recounting because it serves the narrative. The generic phrasing doesn’t prove anything either way.
When I say “a Tuesday in October, Graz, eleven-thirty, the radiator making that particular hissing sound cheap hotel radiators make,” the listener’s brain involuntarily concludes: this is remembered. No one invents that level of specificity. The specificity is itself a form of testimony.
This matters in mentalism particularly. A lot of what I do involves the audience developing genuine trust in the authenticity of what’s happening. If my patter sounds constructed — if it has the texture of assembled narrative rather than remembered experience — that trust erodes. Specific locations do the opposite. They signal real memory, which signals real experience, which builds the trust that makes the rest of the performance work.
The Hotel Rooms
The recurring location in my own material, not by design but by the logic of my life, is hotel rooms.
This started as a constraint. I travel constantly, or I did for many years, and most of my significant practice happened in hotel rooms. They were where I was when I was learning. The important moments — the breakthroughs, the failures, the late-night revelations about what a routine actually needed — happened in specific hotel rooms in specific cities.
When I started using those locations in patter, something clicked.
The hotel room, it turned out, is a perfect story location for the things I’m actually trying to talk about. It’s solitary. It’s anonymous but specific. It’s a place of forced introspection — there’s nothing else to do at midnight in a hotel room in Klagenfurt but think. The image of a person alone with a deck of cards and a laptop in a hotel room is immediately understandable to anyone who has ever been in a hotel room alone. Which is most adults.
The specificity of the location connects my particular experience to the listener’s general experience of solitude and focus. That connection is what makes a personal story feel universal. Not the vague claim that something happened somewhere, but the specific details that let the listener build the room and place themselves in it alongside me.
Practical Technique
When I write patter now, I start with the location. Even if I won’t use all the details in the final script, I work them out first: where was I? What time of day? What was the light like? What sounds were there? What was on the table? What had I been doing immediately before this moment?
Most of these details don’t make it into the final script. But working them out does two things. First, it reactivates the memory — I’m actually going back to the place, not just describing a category of experience. The language that comes out of that real recollection has a texture that assembled language doesn’t have.
Second, it gives me specific details I can deploy strategically. In a 200-word passage of patter, I might use three specific location details. But knowing all twelve of them means I can choose the most evocative three. The radiator making that particular sound. The view of the rooftop. The desk too close to the wall. Each of those does different work, and knowing all of them lets me pick the right ones for the moment.
When the Location Is the Story
The most interesting discovery in all of this was that sometimes the location itself is what the story is actually about.
There’s a concept in my performing life that I’ve come to think of as the hotel room as laboratory. Not just where I practiced — what the practice environment itself did to how I practiced. The isolation, the late hour, the forced singleness of focus that comes from being in a foreign city with nothing else competing for your attention.
That environment shaped how I learned magic in ways I wouldn’t have predicted. And when I talk about it, the hotel room isn’t just backdrop. It’s a character.
That only works if the room is specific. A generic hotel room isn’t a character. The third floor room in Graz with the loud radiator and the rooftop view, in November, with cold tea — that room is a character. It has a personality. It did something to me.
Dicks would recognize this immediately. The physical location doesn’t just situate the story. When it’s specific enough, it participates in the story. It’s doing work.
Put your stories somewhere. Somewhere specific. The audience will build the movie.
They can’t build a movie from “somewhere.”