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 it. (Read the original article here.)

The article received a number of great comments on Facebook. Almost nobody disputed that claim. Instead, reader after reader rose to defend stories 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.

That's the flip side of the coin, and it deserves its own article. The stories between the tricks aren't decoration. They're doing 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, and they operate at three different scales. Words between the tricks can change how the audience experiences you, how they experience an effect, or how they experience the entire evening.

The story that builds the relationship

Comedians figured this out long ago: stories make audiences like you, and audiences who like you lean in. 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: it isn't competing with a routine for attention, it's raising the stakes of every routine still to come.

Two rules follow. First, these stories work between effects and fight you during them, because during the effect the audience has a story of their own to live through. 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 with every question his magic wants to ask. The same story from a weathered sixty-year-old who looks like he's been somewhere might play. 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 confessor. Entertainer to friend. It changes, or it should, and the change can be designed.

The story that charges the moment

Eugene Burger's Gypsy Thread came up in the comments, and it's the perfect example of the second job. The story of the thread is told before the magic happens, in the past tense, at some length. By the logic of the first article, that should be a problem. It isn't, and the reason teaches the rule.

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. Cut those words and the trick survives, but he routine loses something substantial.

Now compare the grandfather example from the first article. Same amount of talking with 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 further with a distinction I've adopted: narrative recounts, drama happens. The grandfather anecdote lives in the past while the card is moving now, and a recounted past struggles against something happening right in front of the audience.

But tense isn't quite the rule, and Burger proves it. His 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 tricks in a row. Each one starts the audience over at zero. Give them something to carry instead, a question planted early, a theme every routine touches, an idea the finale gets to spend, and the accumulation begins: it's what turns twenty minutes of close-up into a set, and an evening into a show. The stories between the tricks are often what does the carrying.

The most ambitious example anyone offered was Derek DelGaudio's In & Of Itself, and it's worth running the test at that scale, in both directions. Remove the story and, as one commenter put it, you'd have some interesting puzzles and a thirteen-minute show. But now run it the other way. Remove the magic and simply tell the story. 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. 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. Theirs 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.

That inverse test is worth carrying home. Remove the magic from your show and tell 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

Here's what the two articles add up to. 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, and many structural problems in a show turn out to be two of them fighting.

The grandfather's real mistake was never that he told a story. It's that he told a relationship story during a routine, at the exact moment the audience needed to be living through 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.

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.