The Stories Between the Tricks

In my article "Stop Adding Stories to Your Magic," I argued that the story of a magic routine isn't something you tell, it's something the audience lives through, and words the magician uses earn their place only when they serve that story. (Read the original article here.)

The article received a number of great comments on Facebook. Almost nobody disputed that claim. Instead, many of the commenters rose to defend stories that the article never attacked. The comedian who talks about his son between effects. The legend a bizarre magician builds before a coin ever moves. The performer who tells you who he is and why he does this. A whole show bound together by one idea, where the effects serve the story instead of the other way around.

Every one of those defenses is correct. And every one of them is about words that live outside the routine.

The stories told by the magician between the tricks aren't decoration. They do real work, just not the same work. Knowing which job a story is doing matters as much outside the routine as it does inside it.

This article discusses three jobs stories can do between the tricks, and they operate at three different scales. They can change how the audience experiences you, how they experience an effect, and how they experience the entire evening.

The story that builds the relationship

Comedians figured this out long ago: stories make audiences like you. Several commenters made this point, and they're right. But notice what the liking is for.

A card returning to the top of the deck for a stranger is a puzzle. The same card returning for someone the audience has come to care about is an event. The relationship doesn't create the impossible moment, it determines how much that moment matters to them. Likability is the amplifier, not the engine, and that's why it can live between effects without harming anything. These kinds of stories aren't competing with a routine for attention, they raise the stakes of every routine still to come.

Two rules follow. First, these stories work well between effects but will fight you during them. During the effect the audience has a story of their own to live through as they experience the magic. Second, the story has to believably belong to you. One commenter put it perfectly: a young magician claiming he found this strange object deep in a foreign jungle isn't building a relationship. He's handing the audience a brand new question, "is he making this up?", that will compete in the audience's mind with experience of the routine. The same story, from a weathered sixty-year-old who looks like he's been somewhere, might play fine. The problem was never the story, it's the fit between the story and the person telling it.

The book, Making Magic Matter, treats this relationship as a story in its own right, with its own arc across the show: who the performer is to the audience at the start of the evening, and who he is to them by the end. Stranger to someone they know. Entertainer to someone they trust. The relationship changes, or it should, and that change can be designed.

The story that charges the moment

Eugene Burger's Gypsy Thread came up in the comments, and it's a good example of the second job, stories that charge the moment. Burger used several different presentations for the effect, but they share the quality that matters here: the story gives the thread significance before the magic happens.

Run the removal test on it. Strip the story away and you have a broken thread restored: a nice puzzle, over in a minute. With the story, the thread stands for something before it ever breaks. The break costs the audience something, and the restoration gives it back. You couldn't cut those words without losing something important from the routine.

Now compare that to the grandfather example from the first article where the talking produces the opposite result. Burger's story points at the thread, the very object the magic is about to happen to. The grandfather's story points away from the card, at the magician. That's the test for any words that precede an effect: when the words end, is the audience looking harder at the magic, or at you?

One commenter sharpened this with a distinction I've adopted: narrative recounts, drama happens. The grandfather anecdote lives in the past while the card is moving now. The recounted past pulls attention away from the thing happening right in front of the audience.

But the rule isn't really about past vs current tense. Burger's story is pure recollection, and it works because the weight of what it recounts is deposited onto the thing in front of you. Docc Hilford's Ripper material does something similar. The history charges the objects, so the effect arrives as dread instead of a puzzle. Words can reach into the past all they like, as long as what they carry back lands on the present.

The story that binds the performance

The first article said that wonder doesn't accumulate but meaning does, building from phase to phase, so the final moment arrives carrying everything before it. Inside a routine, that's the difference between three impossibilities and one story. Beyond the routine, it's the difference between a running order and a performance.

A running order is simply tricks performed in a row. Each one starts the audience over at zero. Give the routines something to carry, a question planted early, a theme every routine touches, an idea the finale gets to spend, and the accumulation begins. That's what turns twenty minutes of close-up into a set, and an evening of routines into a show.

The most ambitious example anyone offered was Derek DelGaudio's In & Of Itself, and it's worth running the test at that scale. Remove the story and, as one commenter put it, you'd have some interesting puzzles and a thirteen-minute show. Now run it the other way. Remove the magic and simply tell the story and nearly everything survives. The whole arc of a man and his labels, performable by a skilled monologuist, as a good play about identity.

What dies is the audience's story. Without the impossible there is no letter from an actual loved one, and no one is named at the end. And look at where the magic sits: the sequences that cannot exist without it are the sequences where the audience stops watching a story and enters one. His arc is theater. The audiences' is magic. The magic isn't illustrating his story, it's creating theirs. The show binds the two with one idea, and the binding is why the ending lands with the weight of the entire evening instead of the weight of one effect.

Remove the magic from your show and see what remains. Whatever survives, the magic was never serving it. If everything survives unchanged, you have a lecture with tricks in it. If the audience's story dies, the magic is exactly where it belongs.

More than one story at once

A performance is never running just one story. There's the story inside each routine, which the audience lives through. There's the story of who you are to them, which builds between the effects. There's the story the whole evening is telling, which every routine either feeds or interrupts. The book tracks four of these running at once, each with its own arc. Many structural problems in a show are caused by two of them fighting.

The grandfather example's mistake was never that the magician told a story, it's that he told a relationship story during a routine, at the exact moment the audience needed to be living a different story entirely. Right words, wrong scale, wrong moment.

So the advice from the first article gains a second half. Inside the routine: stop adding stories, and find the one already there and maximize it. Between the routines: tell your stories, and know which job each one is doing. The words that build the relationship, the words that charge the moment, and the words that bind the evening are all welcome on stage. They just have to know whose story they're serving.

Check out the final article in this series When Magic Tells The Story.

Michael Jons is the author of Making Magic Matter: A Framework for Meaningful Performance, which works through story at every scale a magician performs at: single routines, sets, and full shows. It's available at MakingMagicMatter.com.