Storyworthy

As magicians, we are so immersed in the world of magic that it can be easy to forget how a non-magician might perceive an effect we show them. We are so familiar with tricks that our perspective is skewed.

So here’s a simple way to get yourself back into the non-magician’s mindset and give yourself a better understanding of how a trick might go over for a normal person. This simple heuristic will give you a good idea if a trick is worth performing for people or not.

Here’s how it works…

Don’t imagine yourself performing the trick for someone.

Instead, imagine yourself telling someone about the trick as if it was performed for you.

“So I picked a card and signed it, and then we put it in the middle of the deck, but it kept coming back to the top. The guy wasn’t doing anything at all. He’d just slide the card in the middle and the next thing you know, it was on top.”

You can probably see yourself telling that story.

But what about…

“So I shuffled the deck and cut off a packet of cards and secretly counted the number of cards I had and put them in my pocket. Then I dealt the deck into two piles, stopping whenever I wanted. Then I decided which pile would be the suit and which pile would be the value. So I turned the top card of each pile over and the value card was a four and the suit card was a diamond. So my target card was the 4 of Diamonds. Then we gathered the cards together, and we counted down to my number, that only I knew, and there at my secret number was my freely created card, the 4 of Diamonds.”

Would you tell that story? Probably not. So why would you perform a trick like that?

Isn’t the hope that when you perform a trick, it becomes a story they tell others (or at least themselves) in the future? If you wouldn’t tell that story, why would you expect them to?

Of course, there are ways to present such a trick in a more palatable way, but to get to that point, you have to be able to identify when a trick needs to be overhauled presentationally. Imagining yourself telling the story of a trick—and recognizing if it would feel awkward or dull to tell such a story—is an easy way to get yourself out of your magician’s mind and back into a human one.