Obsession

Once a month, at least, I'll get a long email from someone asking me what I think of their new presentation.

They'll describe the trick to me and it will have what sounds like a lot of interesting elements—the spectator's aura, numerology, some psychological experiment, and a drawing the magician did as a child. I don't mean it will have one of those elements. It'll have all of them. (Not those specific ones. That's just an example.)

And I'll say something like, "It sounds interesting. But I'm not quite following. What is the trick, exactly?"

And then they'll reiterate what they told me the first time.

And I say, "No, I mean from the spectator's perspective. What did they just see happen?"

And that's where the conversation fizzles out. Because they can't answer it.

Their motivation is good. They had a standard meaningless magic trick and they attempted to give it some more compelling presentational elements. But they ended up with a presentation that wasn't meaningful, so much as it was "complex."

Complex can be fine in a novel or a TV series. But it's not great for a magic trick, which by its nature is already going to have something the spectator can't wrap their head around.

Dai Vernon said a good magic effect should easily be described in one sentence. He was talking about what happens in the trick itself. But I think what's more important is that the premise can be explained in one sentence.

You can have a complicated trick where half a dozen things are happening, but if you have a simple premise—

"The magician stepped into a closet that he said took him 12 minutes into the future. When he stepped back out, he was able to predict everything I would do for the next 12 minutes."

then you're all set.

They may not remember every beat of the trick. But they'll remember the premise.

If you can boil the premise down to a sentence, that's your best hope of having a story that sticks with them.

Storytelling Example: Obsession

During one of my daily updates last month, I recommended seeing the movie Obsession.

Since that recommendation, the movie has gone on to become the highest-grossing original live-action films of the decade. Now, is that because I recommended it? Possibly. We'll never know. But I'm guessing at least a couple hundred million of that was the "Jerx-bump."

One thing that makes the movie so good and watchable is the simplicity of the premise: a guy makes a wish that his longtime crush will fall madly in love with him, only for her devotion to spiral into a possessive nightmare.

That's the extent of the backstory. He wishes on a novelty item (a "One Wish Willow") and it actually works.

I watch a lot of horror movies, and so many are bad because they would over-explain how she came to be obsessed with him.

"Turns out the novelty item was a cursed Egyptian relic. The girl is the reincarnation of the guy's long-lost lover from 3,000 years ago. The wish doesn't just make her love him—it awakens her past-life memories and a parasitic demon that feeds on unrequited love, so now she's obsessed, violently jealous of anyone who ever talked to him, and slowly turning into a monster unless they complete a ritual involving his childhood teddy bear."

This is what I often see magicians doing when they try to come up with a "better" premise—they cram in a bunch of different concepts because they think more equals more interesting. It doesn't.