A Simple Way to Script Magic

Writing presentations is boring, difficult, and pointless.

Or at least, that’s what many magicians think—convinced that once they’ve mastered the technique and spent endless, lonely evenings in front of a mirror with a deck of cards, they’re ready for success.

And even if you’re not exactly like that, how many times after a performance have you realized that if only you had said this or that at the right moment, then maybe the audience would have reacted the way you’d always hoped and dreamed of?

Sometimes there’s a big gap between the effort we know we put into a routine and the weak payoff we get in return. How come Blaine wouldn’t say a word, and yet everyone started screaming and running all over the place?

Well—what you say (and how you say it) is at least as important as what you do. The same goes for what you don’t say, and all the times you consciously choose to be silent. Top magicians leave nothing to chance during the key moments of their routines.

Your hands are one with the words coming out of your mouth, and becoming aware of this means accepting that working on a presentation—scripting it, or even just writing parts of it—is perhaps of extraordinary importance.

There will always be that one person among us who writes everything down to feel more secure, but most magicians "improvise," which in many cases means repeating word-for-word what they learned in the tutorial, or just saying the first thing that comes to mind.

A fairly widespread style of more or less "natural" magic, also inspired by the success of card magicians like Dani DaOrtiz, has created the idea that everything is spontaneous and improvised.

But then why is it that if you watch DaOrtiz multiple times, he says the same things at the right moments? And makes the same jokes? And the same pauses? Because that feeling of naturalness and improvisation is part of his method. It is method in the same way his classic forces are method—and he worked on it. Oh, did he work on it.

Natural Scripting

You can sense this kind of mindset shift when you realise that method is not just the technique, the mathematical principle, the setup, and so on. Method is everything you do. In a way, you are the method. But maybe we’re getting too philosophical here.

Coming back down to earth: there’s a principle that allows you to learn how to script in a simple and natural way. This technique is an excellent starting point for taking your first steps into the world of scripting—or for rediscovering some excitement for an aspect of performance that is often overlooked.

We’ll call it "natural scripting." It means starting from what comes naturally to you, so that the script emerges on its own, rather than being artificially created.

If you think about it, it’s not so different from the reflection around character in magic. We often think it’s not very useful to work on character, because we feel it makes us fake and "less natural." But the truth is quite the opposite: having a good character can bring out the best in us as performers and, if we want, make us even more natural—in exactly the way we’d like.

Time to work on the script.

Step One: No Props

Pick a routine you want to learn, or one you haven’t performed that many times yet. The more you can approach this exercise with a mind free from habits and patterns you’ve somehow picked up, the better.