The Five-Pointed Star: A Checklist That Changed How I Design Every Routine
I used to think a good trick was about the method and the script. Then I found a five-element checklist that revealed how much I was leaving on the table.
The Five-Pointed Star Framework
View AllWhy Your Arabian Carpet Matters More Than Your Card Force
I spent months perfecting a technique and nobody cared. Then I spent twenty minutes choosing a tablecloth and it changed everything.
Footsteps on Twigs: How Environmental Sound Design Transforms Magic
I always thought sound in magic meant music. Then I discovered what happens when you design the sonic environment of a performance from scratch.
Russian Cards, Beeswax Wands, and Black Silk: When Props Tell the Story
A prop wrapped in silk communicates something a prop pulled from a printed box never will. I learned to stop treating my tools as tools and start treating them as characters.
Put Flowers in the Vase: Why Contextually Logical Props Strengthen Everything
If you use a vase in your act and there are no flowers in it, the audience already knows it is a trick prop. I had to learn this the embarrassing way.
Weaving Threads: Why Setting, Sound, Light, Props, and Story Must All Agree
I once performed a routine about an old Viennese fortune teller using props that looked like they came out of a plastic bag from a magic shop. The story said one thing. Everything else said another. The audience believed neither.
Finding and Creating Stories
View AllWhy the Best Stories for Magic Are Centuries Old
I spent months trying to invent original stories for my routines. Then I discovered that the most powerful narratives had already been written -- centuries ago, by people whose names are lost to time, in cultures that understood something about storytelling that we have largely forgotten.
Basil Rathbone's Christmas Party: Mining Biographies for Performance Stories
I was looking for a story to frame a routine and found it in the most unlikely place -- a Hollywood actor's memoir from the 1950s. That discovery changed where I look for material forever.
The Playbook Approach: Collecting Stories, Insights, and Philosophies as Raw Material
Matthew McConaughey kept journals for thirty-five years. Austin Kleon maintains a swipe file. Ancient storytellers carried entire libraries in their heads. Three different systems for gathering the raw material that becomes performance -- and what I learned from studying all three.
If They Know the Ending, You've Lost: Choosing Unfamiliar Tales
I built an entire routine around the story of King Midas. The audience knew the ending before I started. The magical climax -- which should have been a revelation -- felt like a formality. That taught me the single most important rule of choosing stories for magic.
Start with the Moon: Hamilton's Four-Step Process for Creating a Performance Piece
I used to start building routines by picking a trick and bolting on words. Then I read a process that flipped the whole sequence on its head -- and everything I built afterward was stronger for it.
The Story Goes Full Circle: Why Circular Narrative Structure Works in Magic
A line you can recall in your last line is worth trying as a first line. That single scripting principle from Pete McCabe changed how I build every routine.
Every Performance Should Leave a Question Hanging in the Air
The best performances I have ever seen did not give me answers. They left me with a question I could not stop thinking about. I am learning to do the same.
Stories as Maps and Medicine
View AllStories as Maps: What a Professional Storyteller Taught Me About Magic
I always thought stories were decoration on top of tricks. Then I encountered the idea that stories are maps -- for navigating landscapes, for navigating life -- and I realized I had been thinking about the relationship between story and magic completely backwards.
Stories as Medicine: The Healing Power Nobody Talks About in Magic
We talk about magic as entertainment, as art, as puzzle-solving. We almost never talk about what stories embedded in magic can actually do for people -- the way they process difficult truths through the safe container of narrative.
The Threshold: Crossing Into a Liminal Space Where Magic Makes Sense
I never understood why 'once upon a time' works until I realized it is not a greeting -- it is a door. And every magic performance needs one.
Containers for Difficult Things: How Stories Let Audiences Process the Impossible
When I stopped presenting tricks and started wrapping them in stories, the audience's resistance didn't just decrease -- it vanished. Stories are containers, and containers make difficult things digestible.
The Hero's Journey in a Three-Minute Card Trick
Joseph Campbell's mythic structure sounded impossibly grand until I realized it maps perfectly onto a simple card routine -- and the hero is not me.
Storytelling Delivery
View AllIf You Keep Stumbling on a Line, the Script Has an Error There
I spent weeks trying to memorize a line that never felt right. The problem was not my memory. The problem was the line.
The Pencil Exercise: A Radio Producer's Trick for Troublesome Words
A former radio producer's absurd-looking pronunciation drill changed the way I prepare for performance. It involves a pencil, your tongue, and the willingness to look ridiculous.
The Box Exercise: How a Radio Training Technique Made Me a Better Performer
I pulled a stapler out of a cardboard box and had sixty seconds to make it the most fascinating object in the world. That drill changed how I perform more than any sleight of hand ever did.
Two Ways to Script a Story: The Flexible Tale and the Fixed Tale
I used to think scripting meant memorizing every word. Then I discovered there are two fundamentally different approaches, and the tension between them taught me more about performance than either one alone.
How I Took Someone Else's Routine and Made It Mine Without Stealing a Word
I bought a routine from a creator I admired, performed it exactly as taught, and it fell completely flat. The problem was not the routine. The problem was that I was wearing someone else's voice.
Small Dog, Big Dog: How Vocal Pitch Controls Your Audience Without a Word
I learned that a higher pitch reassures and a lower pitch commands, and that switching between them is a performance tool hiding in plain sight.
Beeeehold: Why Elongating a Single Word Can Change the Entire Mood
I stretched one word across three seconds and the audience held their breath. Then I clipped the next word to a single beat and they laughed. Vocal elongation is a tool most performers never think to use.
The Silent Language: How Physical Theatre Cues Amplify Your Story
I spent months perfecting my scripts and forgot that my body was telling its own story the entire time -- often contradicting every word I said.
The So What Rule: If Your Audience Would Think It, Cut It
I had a four-minute monologue in my show that I loved. My trial audience's feedback form told me -- in the politest possible terms -- that they did not.
The Storyteller's Identity
View AllI Am Not an Actor Playing a Magician: The Storyteller's Rebuttal
Robert-Houdin's famous line has defined how magicians think about performance for over a century. I think it sells us short.
What I Learned at a Storytelling Festival That Changed My Magic
I went to a storytelling festival with no cards in my pockets and no props in my bag. I came home with the most important lesson I have ever learned about performing.
Give Them Something to Take Home: Why Souvenirs Extend the Magic
The performance ends, the audience applauds, and then they go back to their lives. Unless you give them something physical that keeps the story alive.