The Essential Story
/This is a subject I’ve written about before, but it’s been about five years, and it came up again recently in real life, so I want to re-address the idea here today.
In the last week of March, I spent time with two different magician friends who were dealing with similar, but opposite, issues.
To maintain their anonymity, we’ll call the first person Magician A. And we’ll call the second person—
Yeah, yeah. Magician B. We get it. Just get on with the post.
No. Actually, we’ll call the second person Professor Creighton von Bigglesworth the Third. Don’t get ahead of me.
Magician A was having issues with expanding the premises of the tricks he performed outside of simple “meaningless” tricks. He felt odd delving into a weirder subject matter. Maybe the jacks switching with the aces wasn’t inherently interesting, but it felt natural to him to perform. He was comfortable with it. More comfortable than he felt saying, “I found the weirdest thing at the thrift store recently.”
Professor Creighton von Bigglesworth the Third has the opposite issue. He is completely comfortable presenting tricks with more fanatical premises. His issue is that there are more tricks he would like to perform than there are unique, interesting premises. And he feels weird moving from some crazy story to some pedestrian coin trick.
I understand where both Magician A and Professor Creighton von Bigglesworth the Third are coming from. I’ve been both of them. For the first couple of decades that I was interested in magic, I felt like seeing something impossible should be interesting on its own. And it wasn’t natural to me to try and give a trick any more meaning than that. Shouldn’t a card changing into another card be enough? That’s something impossible. Why does there need to be more to it than seeing something impossible?
This is an attitude a lot of magicians have. And it’s accurate in the sense that the first few things you show a person don’t really need to have much more going on besides seeming impossible. But impossibility loses its novelty remarkably quickly.
In the last decade or so, I’ve learned the power of recontextualizing effects. How you can create a story around the effect that leaves them not just fooled, but completely enraptured in the experience. And that type of performance can stick with people in much more significant ways. And as I delved into that style, the pendulum of my performing swung heavily to Professor Creighton von Bigglesworth the Third’s end of the spectrum.
The problem becomes, if you only want to perform highly affective or immersive magic, you are greatly limiting your opportunities to perform and the material you can use. Because not every situation is conducive to that type of interaction, and most tricks don’t lend themselves to that style. You also quickly learn that for the sake of pacing, you want to have your most powerful magic effects spaced out a little. If every time you see them you take them on a 45-minute magical journey, then that will soon become routine. So you mix up those moments with impossibilities that are just cool or fun or “eye-candy” or thought-provoking or whatever the case may be.
I think the hard part for people can be navigating their way between these two types of magic. How can you do Sponge Bunnies one week and then hope to get people to lose themselves in a more immersive trick the next? Or vice versa. How can you predict someone’s actions via a Groundhog Day situation one week and then get them to care about Color Monte the next?
The key is The Essential Story.
You need to have a narrative that accounts for everything you might want to ever show people. Once this is established, you can twist balloon animals, and bend a key with your mind, and display a piece of secret government technology you bought on the black market. Not all in the same interaction (because that makes no sense) but over time. Your story needs to allow you to “code switch” between fun little tricks and deep mind-bending experiences.
What is the story that covers all these things?
Well, the basics elements are these:
When you were younger, you had an interest in magic.
You learned all you could through the normal channels—the library and teaching videos.
You started digging deeper. Started going to magic stores. Maybe got a mentor. Sent away for books that couldn’t be found in normal bookstores or libraries. Started going to conventions.
Through this process you encountered some interesting people. And through those interesting people you met some strange people. And through them, you’ve learned about and encountered some weird things.
So the story is rooted in truth: When you were young, you had an interest in magic. And that seed of truth can be followed as it branches out into weirder and weirder areas. My uncle showed me a magic trick. Because of that, I wanted to learn magic. I learned everything I could from the library. I started going to a local magic store. The owner told me about a convention where magicians would speak and teach tricks. I started going to conventions regularly. One time I met this guy there who was selling a floating dollar trick, but it didn’t use any of the methods magicians know about. It used a special kind of powder that this guy claimed he got from another guy who lived in a cabin in the woods in Minnesota. And that guy claims the powder is made from grinding this material that he found in a meteorite that crashed on his property. Well… the government claims it’s a meteorite. But this guy believes it was some kind of spacecraft.
etc. etc,
Now, I’m not saying I would ever tell the story in that way. I wouldn’t go back to my uncle showing me a trick in order to tell the story of this special powder that is made of ground-up alien bones. I’m just making the point that if people understand this essential “story,” then it can really lead to any type of trick.
The story is: I had an early interest in magic, and by pursuing that I was introduced to all sorts of weird people, concepts, and objects.
People in my life know this about me. And because people know this is my backstory, I can go from a psychological trick during one meetup, to a gambling demonstration the next, to invoking possession by a demon the next, to the Hot Rod the next. It all “works.” Nothing throws them off. They can enjoy the frivolous tricks, but still get wrapped up in the deeper mysteries.
Magician A’s issue was that he never hinted that his “story” involved an evolution of his interests beyond standard magic tricks. So it felt strange to bring up anything too “out there” to his friends.
Professor Creighton von Bigglesworth the Third’s issue was that he didn’t embrace his interest of traditional old-fashioned magic. So anything that didn’t fall in his narrow presentation style (which was a collection “unusual objects”) was unusable for him.
Of course, if you only ever want to perform material with ONE style of presentation (e.g. “I’m a master of deductive reasoning.”) then you can have a much more focused backstory. But most of us enjoy performing a wide range of material in various styles. And if that’s you, then establishing a backstory along the lines of what I’ve written here will allow you a great deal of freedom. It allows you to perform the most trivial magic effects as an example of the tricks that originally got you interested in the art. But at the same time, it doesn’t get in the way of you presenting something that’s designed to feel weirder and more engrossing than “just a trick.”