Dear Jerxy: Cutting Them Off

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Dear Jerxy: What do you do if people are asking to see trick after trick? My instinct tells me not to do too many, in order to not overwhelm them and keep the tricks feeling special. On the other hand, if they’re asking to see something, and I have tricks I could be showing them, it feels dumb to not be showing them something. But I have so many in my repertoire I sometimes feel like I can’t stop. What do you think?

Signed,
Stopless in Seattle

Dear Stopless: The key factor in my decision making in this sort of situation is if I’m ever going to see this person again. For example, if I’m traveling and I strike up a mini-friendship with someone on a flight or at a hotel bar or something, I may end up showing them something. And if they’re super enthusiastic and asking for more, more, more, I may just go all night with them. I do this even though I think it’s a detriment to the magic, and even though I know the impact of any given effect will be lessened when performed in this way.

But I do this for two reasons:

  1. It gives me the chance to try out a bunch of stuff I’m working on in an efficient way (as in not having to find a different person for each trick).

  2. I try to think about what’s best from their perspective. If someone really loves seeing magic, is it better for them to focus that energy on one truly mind-blowing piece of magic? Or to see a whole bunch of stuff? I think an argument can be made for both. But if I’m only going to see them this one time, and they really love magic, and they’re asking for more, then I’m probably going to give them as much as they want. It’s likely going to blend into one generic memory in their mind, with very few specific details sticking out. But I’m fine with that if they look back and think what an enjoyable time they had in a general way.

The question is, how does me performing best serve this interaction and this relationship? With a single-serving friend, it can make sense to go ahead and overwhelm them with stimuli and perform a lot.

With someone you’re going to see at least semi-regularly, the relationship/interaction will be best be served by performing less, and keeping those performances feeling somewhat special.

I will give you a damn near perfect analogy for this...

Imagine you met a professional pastry chef somewhere randomly. You can imagine that an amazing memory would be the night you met that pastry chef and they shared with you a dozen different desserts. And you had bite after bite of cakes and cookies and doughnuts and croissants and cinnamon rolls and so on.

But if your friend was a pastry chef, and you saw her somewhat frequently, your enjoyment of those desserts would likely diminish if she brought you a bunch of stuff every time you saw her. At the very least, your appreciation for that lemon blueberry pie would be greater if she brought you one perfect slice to indulge in, rather than if it was one of eight desserts you tried. And the memory of that pie eaten on its own would almost certainly be much stronger and more long-lasting.

The impreciseness of this analogy is only in the fact that the average person has a much bigger appetite for pastries than magic. So the concept of getting “burned out” on something is only more true for magic than baked good.

But how do you gently turn someone down if they’re asking to see more and you’re trying not to wear them out?

Well, this is where it helps to frame yourself as someone with an interest in magic and not someone with any legitimate special powers. People outside of the magic world don’t have a clear understanding of how magic works in the broad sense. So if you perform a trick or two and they’re asking for more, you can just say that at this point in time you don’t have anything else to show them. You can say something like, “These aren’t like the tricks you would read in books in the public library, where you can just learn a whole bunch, and always be able to perform a couple dozen tricks at any time. With these types of tricks you sort of master one or two at a time. And if you don’t keep on top of them regularly, your ability to perform them falls away.”

If you say, “I don’t really know anything else I can show you at the moment,” that maintains the rarity of the magic performance without you having to say, “No! I’m done.”

At this point it’s a great idea to tell them about something you’re “working on” that you’ll try to have ready the next time you see them. Or teach them a trick that sets them up to be more fooled sometime down the road. This way you can capitalize on their interest in a way that boosts future performances.

Dustings #59

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This gets my vote for worst magic trailer of the year. Thoughts? —RE

Well… hmmmm. The trailer is nicely shot and put together professionally. So in that sense it’s fine. But I’m not sure that’s what we care about from magic trailers.

I’m not someone who is super interested in puling a shish kebab skewer (or whatever) out of my finger, so I sent this along to a virtual focus group of 20 people and asked these questions.

What is the trick supposed to be?

Were you fooled by the trick?

What is your best guess as to how the trick is done?

18 people responded. They all seemed to understand the idea of the trick. Three of them said they were fooled. And all of them had the same or similar “best guess” that involved him hiding the stick behind his hand (either during a cut or when the hand goes off screen). So based on what we see in the trailer, everyone had a reasonable explanation for how it was done. So I guess that would qualify it as not a good trailer.

Obviously if seeing this in real life, they would have to come up with some other explanation because you can’t cut or “go off screen” in the real world. But we don’t really know what this might look like in the real world, so there’s no way to judge.

As a magician, if I wanted to perform this trick, the important thing for me would be to have some idea of what it looks like in a real performance. How much freedom of movement do I have? How easy is it to get into the trick? This trailer addresses none of that. You have one choppy demonstration in the forest, and then one that was apparently shot in a cavern during a solar eclipse. If the goal is to sell me on a trick, that does the opposite. It suggests no confidence in what this trick might look like in the real world.

(If the people behind this trick want to link me to an uncut, real-world performance, I’d be happy to post it here. I’m here to help!)

That’s why, even though the production value is considerably lower, I much prefer this trailer for Marcus Eddie’s similar effect, Splinter.

At least that tells me what I’m getting.

Okay, I need your help. I’ve found myself using the word “magical” more often on this site and I can’t really tell if it’s accurate writing or lazy writing.

What I’m trying to describe is a quality of certain effects where the response goes beyond “How did he do that?” and is more like, “How could this be possible?”

There’s an otherworldliness to the “magical” feeling. It’s not just something you feel in your head, it’s in your whole body.

I think there are three responses to magic in general. An audience can be left:

  • feeling entertained

  • feeling fooled

  • with a magical feeling

Not just one of these, of course. They can feel each thing to a different extent.

However, almost all of our time, effort, and discussion in magic is spent on how to fool people to greater degrees.

Then, a smaller percentage of “more evolved” performers are thinking about how to be more entertaining with their fooling.

But hardly anyone is talking about the dreamy, romantic, mystifying, “magical” feeling that certain tricks/presentations can generate. I get the impression some people think that if you just fool people hard enough that will somehow get them to that “magical” feeling. But I don’t think the two things are necessarily related.

Anyways, while a lot of the stuff I’ve written has been my attempt to come up with ways to target the magical feeling, I’ve only recently started thinking about it in this specific way. And I’m wondering if there’s a better word to be using than “magical.” If you have thoughts, let me know.

Thanks for those of you who’ve sent me some bad forces as per my last post.

Here’s a nice bad one to get your audience to think card forces are dumb . Your force card is on top. You cut the deck into 6 piles and form them into a line with the top pile third from one of the ends. Then you use the Hot Rod force to force that pile and turn over the top card. In this case you would actually hope to get a number you have to spell, as that makes the force dumber.

Now, to be clear, I’m not suggesting you teach this to someone out of the blue. I’m suggesting you do something where you reference a trick you’re “working on” or an “earlier version” of a trick you want to show them at some point. Then you demonstrate the trick and in the place of a good force, you use a shitty one. Which then gets exposed/taught when you break down the effect for them. (See the previous post and the posts linked within it to further clarify this idea.)

You want it to seem as if this is the type of thing you’d do to force a card. That way, later when you say, “Okay, just touch any card for me,” that will feel like something entirely different and free and normal.

Can someone explain the number of retweets on this tweet?

I mean, clearly they’re not legit, but I’m just wondering where they came from (and where they’ve gone to). I can only assume someone bought some fake retweets as a goof (or because they really think I have a Twisting the Aces presentation). Then those accounts got douched out by twitter, but still the number of retweets remains? I don’t really give a shit either way. Just curious.

Help Wanted: What's the Worst Force You Can Think Of?

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In this post I wrote about the concept of having a bad marked deck, and why you might want to create one in order to corrupt people’s understanding of what a marked deck is. I enjoy this type of thing—planting seeds for things you won’t harvest until some time has passed. If I ask people if they’ve ever seen a marked deck, most haven’t. And if I introduce the Bad Marked Deck to them, and they believe that to be what marked decks are like, I can then use a good marked deck in the future and—with any luck—they will dismiss the possibility of it being a marked deck because it’s not used in a manner that they would associate with the deck I’ve shown them.

The idea being that people already know about marked decks, so now I want to poison that knowledge in some way. It wouldn’t make sense to introduce a concept to them, and then try and undermine it. But if they already have heard about something, I want to make that thing seem more inadequate than it really is.

You’ll sometimes see this done with the concept of “palming.” Laypeople have already heard of palming so sometimes magicians will mention it in their presentations (such as with the Invisible Palm effect) and demonstrate it in a way that it seems like it wouldn’t fool anyone. That’s the sort of thing I’d like to do with every magical concept laypeople are familiar with.

(By the way, if you’re a supporter of this site, the Jerx Deck you’ll receive next year in your supporter package is going to be a bad marked deck. Not “funny” bad. But just overly-complicated bad.)

So now I’m thinking about ways to do that with card forcing because I’ve recently been doing a number of effects that start with me performing and explaining a shitty version of the trick and then following that up with a similar effect but with a completely different method. This structure seems to generate much stronger responses for me than just doing the better version in isolation. (For more details on this, see this post. Or, if you’re a supporter of the site, see the essay “Garden Pathing” in issue 2 of this year’s newsletter.)

Since I’ve been teaching a lot more crappy tricks, many of which require a force, I need to identify some bad forces that meet these criteria:

They fool people to the extent that it’s not completely obvious how the card was forced.
BUT
The selection process is unnatural/needlessly complicated in a way that makes it obvious this isn’t a truly “free” selection.
AND
Exposing the force wouldn’t reveal any useful deception techniques.

The first thing that came to mind was the 10-20 force, because, as it’s generally described, it’s fucking stupid. “Name a number between 10 and 20,” is no way to start off anything that’s supposed to feel free or random in any manner. At least not when you’re holding something with 52 options in your hand.

And, of course, and process that forces a number could then be used to force a card by counting down to that number in the deck.

But I’m still looking for some more bad forces. So if you know of any (or can create one), send me an email and let me know.

Combining exposure and weak methods is a powerful concept. Teaching them a method, even if it sucks, gives them that little dopamine hit of learning a secret. But it also takes them further away from the sort of methods I’m going to be using. Since they already know of the concept of card forcing, I want them to believe it amounts to literally forcing a card into someone’s hand from a spread (a la the classic force), or that it requires a very convoluted process. That way when they’re just cutting a deck, or touching a card freely, or stopping me while I deal—they’ll be less likely to even conceive those actions could be part of a force.

Monday Mailbag #60

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Re: A Jerxian Breakthrough

The breakthrough you’ve discovered is called “honesty and consent.”

All the cool kids are trying it. —MW

Fair enough.

But more than “consent,” I think what I’m searching for in that type of interaction is understanding.

If I say, “Hey, do you want to see a magic trick?” And they say yes. Then I have their consent. But I don’t necessarily have their understanding of what I mean when I ask them if they want to see a magic trick. Because what I want from them is to know that when I show them a trick it might involve a little more involvement and suspension of disbelief than what they may be imagining.

If I ask them if they want to see a trick and they consent and I do a gambling demonstration, I think that works out well.

If I ask them if they want to see a trick and they consent and I do the Ocean’s Eleven version of Spectator Cuts the Aces from this post, then they’re going to be weirded out, because that’s not their understanding of how a magic trick is framed.

The “breakthrough” I had was that by telling them a story about a different performance, or something else I was working on, I could then indirectly familiarize them with the type of of magic I like to perform. And this would allow me to get their “consent” to seeing that type of magic without having to be a real dork about it and be, like, “So, it’s a magic trick. But I often embed it in a kind of fictional interaction. And I don’t want you to be there thinking, ‘That’s not a special kind of gum. That’s just ordinary gum!’ I just want you to try and engage with the story of this special gum. I’m not trying to convince you the gum is actually special. That’s just the story. Got it? Sign here if you consent to seeing such a trick.”

Hey Andy,

How about doing the Invisible Deck as a trick that a mysterious stranger apparently does for you via post?

That way you can secretly control the outcome for the spectator - whilst giving the credit to the mysterious magician friend.—JM

It’s a good idea, but as someone who has done a lot of faux “third party” magic tricks (where someone else outside of myself and the participant is apparently controlling the magic), I know that they have to end examinable. In these types of presentations its incumbent on you to act like a real spectator. Otherwise it just comes off as a fake-y presentation.

So at the end of the Invisible Deck you’d want to be able to look over the deck just to search for some clue in regards to how it was done. Obviously if you’re using the standard Invisible Deck, that wouldn’t be possible.

But one of the benefits of using a “third-party” presentation is that it can be easier to switch things and end clean. There are a couple reasons why it’s easier:

  1. Because you’re not playing the part of the magician, there’s going to be a little less heat on you.

  2. You can add in instructions from “the magician” that give you the time and opportunity to do switches, and you don’t have to justify your actions because you’re just following instructions.

Here’s what I mean. If you sent yourself an Invisible Deck in the mail and wrote instructions from “the magician” who sent it to you and the instructions said. “One of you should name any card in the deck. The other person should spread through the deck and remove the one card I reversed in this deck before I sent it to you. Don’t look at it just yet. Have whichever of you named the card hold onto it.” If, at this point in the instructions, it said to walk over to a mirror or close your eyes and repeat some phrase or to switch seats or whatever, that’s all the time you would need to do a deck switch for a normal deck.

I would recommend a deck switch for a deck whose back doesn’t match the back of the invisible deck for a few reasons. First, because it adds a Brainwave type of effect to the interaction. Second, it prevents the notion that maybe you were in on it and you just flipped over the card they named and they weren’t paying close enough attention to notice. And third it leaves you completely clean at the end.

If you don’t use a different color deck, then you end up with a duplicate of whatever card they named. Maybe it’s unlikely to get noticed, but it’s still there. If you do use a different colored deck, then even though there is another one of the named card in the deck, that can make sense if the trick is that the magician took a card from a blue deck and reversed it and stuck it into a red deck before mailing it off. There would be no discrepancy if that was the premise.

But yeah, using an ID in this way is definitely do-able because you can be so clean with it. And that’s what third-party magic requires.

For Christmas you could wrap up the ID and put a bow on it and send it to your house. Apparently from your “magician friend.” And this trick is his “gift” to you (or you and your family).

Dustings #58

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I once had an idea for a dating site where you would upload the least flattering pictures of yourself. Maybe there would be some sort of vetting by people who worked on the site to make sure these are truly bad pictures of you. Otherwise the site would operate like a normal dating site. Except when you get to the point where you finally meet your match in person and you think, “Oh, wow! What a pleasant surprise!”

I’ve always done my best to set low expectations with people. If you tell people you’re a great worker, or a great cook, or a great lover, or whatever—that might get your foot in the door (or penis in the vagina)—but then you have to put your actual abilities up against the power of their imagination. And that’s a battle you can almost never win.

This phenomenon plays out in magic ads as well.

Take this trick, SOLID. I watched the video and at first I thought, “A borrowed, signed key penetrates into a can or bottle? That sounds amazing.” Immediately my mind was churning over the possibilities.

Then I watched a little more and did a little reading and realized the key isn’t borrowed. It’s your own key. And it’s a key that easily fits into the can. And you start the effect by just openly putting the key in the can and then “removing” it. Does this make it a bad trick? Not necessarily. But it just makes it not the trick I originally was hoping for.

Now, had the ad copy started, “You pull out your keyring and remove a small key,” they probably would have sold a copy to me. No, I wouldn’t have been initially as interested as I was when I thought it was a regular-sized borrowed key, but at least my interest wouldn’t have waned the more I learned about the trick. I would have been focused on the positives of the trick rather than where it didn’t live up to my expectations.

Is this good marketing advice? No, probably not. But I’m mentioning it now because if and when I start releasing products in the future, I’m going to use this approach. I’m going to establish the limitations and the weak spots first and then express what makes the trick worth it despite those factors.

Love to see such a genuine excited reaction to a magic performance…

This trick teaches the very important lesson that bullying isn’t all that bad because the effects of bullying can be undone with the snap of your fingers. Wait… that can’t possibly be the message, can it?

Hmm…

Well, I can’t find any other lesson to be learned here.

The sad thing is, even if you can solve your bullying problems with magic, you still have parents that sent you to school with a lunch consisting of a juice box, a mandarin orange, and cookies. Jesus, mom, get the kid some goddamn protein. No wonder he’s getting bullied. He can’t build any muscle mass!

A Jerxian Breakthrough

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There’s a certain style of magic I write about frequently here that I describe as “immersive fiction” or the “Romantic Adventure” performance style. That’s where the goal is for the trick to feel less like a demonstration and more like an (obviously) fictional story that they are taking a part in. In a previous post I described this as a direction that magic might evolve towards in the future (for certain types of performers).

I wrote:

I suspect magic will be seen as a form of experiential storytelling. Instead of being a one person exhibition (like being a juggler or ventriloquist) it will be more aligned with things like escape rooms, haunted houses, or parlour games. I think magic won't be seen as something you do, but an experience you create. The best magicians will be those who craft the best immersive stories for people.

The issue with this is that it’s kind of an unusual way to present magic. And while I find it to be wildly more enjoyable for people to experience than a traditional “demonstration of my magic skills,” it’s also something they’re not used to. There’s a learning curve involved when it comes to enjoying this sort of performance because it doesn’t really work well if the spectator has the typical mindset people often approach magic with: “You’re going to try and fool me, and my goal is to try and figure it out.” Having their guard up means they’re not appreciating the story because they’re questioning it. That’s not an attitude that helps them get immersed in what you’re showing them. “Wait… your aunt wasn’t a gypsy. I’ve met your aunts.” That’s not the vibe you want them to have.

The ideal mindset I want my spectators to have is, “This story is meant to be fictional, so I can just let myself get lost in it without questioning things. And I’m not going to figure out the magic no matter how hard I try, so I might as well sit back and enjoy it.”

That’s the “ideal,” mind you. I’m not saying everyone I perform for has this mindset.

The hard part of this style of magic is really getting people somewhere near that point. Magic—especially amateur magic—is almost defined by the “challenge” of it. So coming at it from a different perspective can be difficult for people.

For a long time, the only method I had in my arsenal to get people prepared for this type of performance was to slowly introduce it to them over the course of many performances. The post I’ve linked to the most on this site is this Bedrock post where I talk, step by step, about how I go about doing that. It’s a long process, but it’s an enjoyable one for me.

But now I’ve found a shortcut to get people up to speed on what I’m going for much faster.

This was really a breakthrough for me, and it’s so obvious and stupid that it shouldn’t have been, but it is.

Here’s my big breakthrough. Here’s how I get people to expect a different type of magic experience…

I tell them.

I just tell them that I make up stories to go along with the tricks, or to give the tricks the feeling of a weird experience or something like that.

This doesn’t get them prepared to sit through a 90 minute immersive trick. But it does get them to used to the idea that we both know this is meant to be a fictional little bit of entertainment, and not to get too worked up about trying to “catch me” when the story is unfolding.

I stumbled over this when I pulled out the trick Kids Kards for the first time in a while. Someone I didn’t know too well was at my place and I told her something truthful. I said, “Oh, this is a trick I used to do a lot but I stopped doing it. I would tell people this story about me dating this elementary school teacher and how I would visit the classroom and do a trick every now and again. And at the end of the year the kids made me this deck of cards. And blah, blah, blah. But the problem was, people were really believing the story. And they were getting emotionally invested in these kids and this relationship. And I didn’t want that. I was just trying to show them something fun. Here, I’ll show you.”

Then I went into the trick with my old presentation. And she was immediately onboard. Because she knew it was a made-up story, she could just let herself go along with it. She didn’t have to question whether I believed it or whether I wanted her to believe it. She could just enjoy it. And then, later in the evening when I went into another trick, she again instantly realized what the situation was. I didn’t have to explain to her again what the deal was, because I had already established the type of thing to expect.

And I’ve had similar success with other people. I just have to say something, anything really, that lets them understand that I like to use magic to create the feeling of going through some weird experience. That these stories are intended to be fictional and just for their enjoyment.

I would say that I still prefer taking the long way to get to this point and slowly getting them accustomed to this style of performance. But if I want to move that process along, or if I’m not going to have that much time with the person, this technique allows me to get into some more interesting performances, without freaking them out, and without the intermediary steps along the way

Monday Mailbag #59

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You’ve come up with a bunch of different terminology in your time writing this site (Imps, Reps, etc.). I think you need a word for a trick that magicians are really excited for but laymen care much less about. And for that I would go with “Cog.”

This is based on the Cognito App which all of my magic friends have been amazed by, but the laypeople I perform for have been underwhelmed by. It doesn’t get bad reactions, but it rarely gets great reactions for me either, except from other magicians. I’ve even had some laypeople suss out the general idea of the binary principle. Not down to the mathematics but the idea that knowing which photos they say yes to would allow you to know which card they’re thinking of.

Do you have any ideas on how to bring the focus off the phone when using the Cognito App? — LH

No, I don’t, I’m afraid. As I said when I originally talked about this app, the issue I see with it is that it requires a lot of energy to be focused on the phone. To pull that energy off the phone and make it about something real between the people taking part in the interaction… that’s going to be hard.

The issue with using the app to find out what someone is thinking is that it requires a lot of, “Is your card in this picture? Is it in this picture? Is it in this picture? Is it in this picture?” This is the dull, uninteresting part so people try to rush through it. Understandably. But if you rush through the dull, uninteresting part, you’re suggesting to the spectator that this is actually the important part (method wise). If it wasn’t important, you wouldn’t include it, because it’s dull and uninteresting.

So, counterintuitively, what you might want to try is to focus more time on this part of the process. By focusing more time on it, and adding some creative elements to it, you can make it feel like more of a theatrical necessity rather than a methodological necessity. I don’t know if that would work, but that’s what I would try.

Other that that, I will again say that there are likely to be very few really cohesive plots and premises that make a ton of sense with this app (and the process of looking through multiple photos). It’s probably a better use of your time to identify the two or three premises that work really well, rather than trying to use it to solve many magic problems. For example, is this ACAAN procedure using the app (which involves a meaningless, unrelated “observation test,” and a meaningless, unrelated “estimation test,” before getting to the ACAAN part) a step forward in ACAAN methodology? In my opinion, no. You can say, “Yes, but the spectator never has to name their card!” Okay, but they have to do a bunch of other junk you don’t have to do with other ACAANs. And I’m not sure the trade-off is worth it. That, I feel, is an example of using the app for the sake of the app, not because it really makes for a better trick.

Finally, on the subject of this app, supporter Jonathan FC wrote the following which I think might have some merit:

I think it could also be used with your transgressive anagram philosophy.

By this i mean, use the cognito procedure, like a failed attempt of mind reading. Ditch it. And then once you have the peek you can go for a more interesting presentation.

Will you be buying your boy Josh’s new matching deck effect? If so, will you tell the story of his parents meeting as it was the story of your parents meeting? —AS

No, I won’t be getting that trick. I think it’s a great trick for certain performance situations, and I enjoy the story Josh tells with it. And I have no doubt a lot of people will get a lot out of it. My performance style is too casual for it. And my friends are the type who really want to prod the mystery to see if it’s completely airtight and they would definitely look at the spread of cards at the end to make sure everything was copacetic, and you can’t really have that. Plus I have my own deck matching effect I already do.

But if you are going to do the effect in a situation where people don’t know you, you can probably steal Josh’s story and not have to worry about not getting away with it.

If you don’t want to take that exact story, you can easily create something similar. All you need to do is come up with some arbitrary circumstances and plug those into the story. “If his shoelace hadn’t broke, he wouldn’t have had to stop at the store,” blah, blah. If you can’t plug in your own details that you create into that format, then you’re close to braindead. Go ahead and just steal the story of how Josh’s parents met, because your parents did have any kids that lived, apparently.

Your post about how Mentalists reveal information was very timely. The previous week, at an Elder’s meeting, a performer did a routine with this type of finish, where you reveal what you have read in the person’s mind. And my comments to him were all about the reveal, and your post made the rounds and produced lots of good thinking. So thanks.

I remember when I worked on the staff of a Sitcom, we talked about beats. Basically this meant any moment where a character has any emotional reaction. Big or small, happy or sad, annoyed or pleased. Anything.

One main goal of reviewing the script this way was to make sure that we did not repeat a beat, unless it was to specifically set up something based on the repeat. But if character A displays some annoyance at something character B did, and they repeat it, it can not be the same annoyance. It has to be bigger, or the target has to be slightly different, but it has to be moving in some direction.

This was what I didn’t like about that performer’s presentation. He got a fact, then he got another one, then he got another one, until he was done. Each moment was impossible, but they were all exactly the same beat.

So I think the reveal has to have its own arc. It has to go somewhere.

I find thinking about “beats” like this is a useful way to improve these sections.

And not just in mentalism. How many ace assemblies or coins across routines have the exact same beat three times in a row? —PM

Yes, good points here.

I don’t mind too much if the “beats” are the same, so long as that’s done to set a pattern that is somehow broken in the climax of the trick. But yeah, usually it’s just, “This coin went from one hand to the other. Then this one did. And this one did. And also this one did. The end.”

However, for me, the even bigger sin—going back to the idea of mentalism reveals—is when there’s just a straight line between each reveal and the ending. It just makes for a dull story with no climax.

It would be like if you were watching a mystery movie or reading a mystery novel and halfway in the detective determines the killer is a man, then a little while later that the killer is in the same neighborhood, and then that the killer lives in the house next door. If that’s how the book progresses it’s not going to be very interesting at the end when he’s like, “And the killer is… the neighbor!” Like yeah, we know.

However if the detective remains silent throughout the book, or he appears to be grasping at straws, or if he’s clearly on the wrong path, then it becomes interesting when the pieces fall into place at the climax. That’s the approach I was recommending in that post.