The 20/60/90 Magic Show Rule

Over the years, I’ve really had to hone in on how quickly I can help working magicians craft the perfect stage show. The goal is to deliver this without taking up too much development time, ideally in a way that allows the show to be flexed and changed for different scenarios. Can you write a show that works for an hour but also for twenty minutes, depending on the booking? The answer is yes.

I’ve named this the 20/60/90 rule — and you will rely on it for the rest of your career.

Now, when I began sharing my experience and advice online, I soon learned to avoid taking credit for ideas, concepts, or names. If I told the internet about a concept I had, magicians would often push back. They’d point out its flaws and be reluctant to try its benefits. The opposite would be true when I presented a concept I named as if it had been a thing in magic for many years before me. Suddenly, magicians would tell me they’d been using this for years, and they’d heard the name before — sure.

I was just happy people were using them.

Naming concepts is really important because it helps you understand when and why you use them. Several times now, magicians in conversation have talked to me about their use of “narrowing forces,” and they seemed unaware that I coined the term. I’m sure someone said it before me (don’t come at me now - the fact I came up with it proves anyone else could), but it’s a nice, amusing feeling to recall sitting at my desk trying to come up with a good name for the idea I wanted to explain: “narrowing forces”.

I couldn’t decide between that and “funnel force,” so I wrote, “A narrowing force (sometimes referred to as a funnel force) is a type of force in which the spectator does not get forced a specific outcome but instead toward a much smaller range of choices.”

The 20/60/90 rule — I came up with this.

I was walking to the shops, trying to decide how on earth I could put into words the show template I’d come up with for writing for professional magicians. I wanted something my clients would understand intuitively — because I knew what I was doing and that I was using this template in my work, but I hadn’t quite figured out the best way to explain it. But here it is, now you know — the 20/60/90 rule for a magic show.

This showwriting rule sets out to answer two key questions.

Firstly, what makes a show feel like a complete show? The answer is tricky for most magicians. Does it need a theme? A throughline? Perhaps all of the tricks need to tell a story — no, that feels like too much, maybe two of the tricks? Or five?

The second question: can you write a show you’re free to change? Magicians are not like actors. They very rarely want a script with every word they’ll say. Writing for magicians is much closer to writing for comedians — a play is a play regardless of the audience. Sure, you’ll refine and improve a few things during the previews of a play. But, much like comedy, you don’t always know what’s working with magic shows without an audience there. Great magic shows are constantly changing and improving. You might also get booked for a fifty-minute cruise show, an hour-long festival show, or a twenty-minute corporate set. You need that freedom there.