The magic journal and a way to improvement

In the newsletters before this one, I’ve been talking a lot about slowing down, improving the things that we are already doing, and truly studying something. This is all nice to be said and it’s also something that sounds easier said than done.

It’s similar advice to “write a script”, scripting is hard, and it’s even harder if you don’t know what you’re doing. And at the same time scripting is likely to be unsuccessful if you don’t know yourself as a performer. You need to know the performer that you want to be, how you behave as a person, and how you talk. But this is not a discussion on scripting, it’s a discussion on how to improve your magic.

Often in magic books and also online we hear the advice “Don’t do this trick exactly as explained in the book, perform it in your unique way”. I for one, think that this is terrible advice.

In magic, for some reason, we put way too much focus on creativity and originality and not on the performance of good magic. This would be equivalent to someone learning how to play the guitar and the teacher telling him “This is going to be your first song, but I want you to figure out a way to play it in a creative and original way”. That would be absolutely terrible advice. We learn anything by imitation. Especially in the beginning, we learn anything by imitating someone who is very good at something. Then only later once we’ve completely mastered that specific thing and many similar things our brains start to make connections.

In the beginning, when we’re learning magic we have to imitate the magic exactly as it’s done. This is very good because we learn about phasing, and about why certain moves are executed at certain moments in the routine. After doing this for a while our brain will start to make connections and only at that point, we’ve reached the point where we can inject our own personality and touches into the routine.

Injection

But once we’ve arrived at that point, then how do we actually make the routines better?

This is where a notebook comes into play. I’ve always been a big fan of a notebook for writing down ideas, but also for analyzing the magic that I do.

Here is an example of how I’d analyze an effect.

Let’s say that the effect is the Biddle trick.

I write in my notebook:

Name of trick Biddle trick

What is the effect? The teleportation of a card

How would I rate my current version? 3

What do I need to improve?

• Make it more convincing that the card is really in the 5-card packet

• Make the moment of travel more magical

• Find a reason to split the deck into two

explanation

What I’ve written above is very simple, but it often already helps us to write down what the effect experienced by the audience is. If it can’t be explained in one sentence it’s often not a very good effect.

Then the most important thing that I wanted to focus on in this newsletter is the rating of the trick. As you can see above in the example I rated it at a 3. But a three compared to what?

In my notebook, I like to start it off by writing down a rating for each trick that I have. My best trick at the moment, or at least, the one that feels the best in my hands and that feels like the strongest to my audience is the linking rings. This trick is rated a 5 in my notebook.

Others will have a rating from 1 to 5. The goal is to in the end make every trick at least a 3 or higher. Once that’s achieved it’s to make every trick at least a 4 or higher.

You can start to think about what makes certain tricks good and what could be better about the trick that you’re already doing. What could be a better moment? Or better procedures to go through the routine? Usually already asking yourself these questions will do a lot for the magic.

This rating system has helped me plenty and it has forced me to sit down and work on something.

By writing it down it becomes real, also the mind becomes focused on just one thing and it will focus you to completely work on just one routine in that moment.

I also encourage you to search for different people’s their versions of the routine, this doesn’t need to be the download, it can just be a video on YouTube.

You can then start to analyze their routine and see if they’ve solved problems that you were finding in your routine.

It’s recommended when you do this, however, that you first find your own solution. Then you can see if you found the same solution, or maybe a different one and you can learn from that.

I encourage all of you to take a notebook and start writing down and journaling about your magic.

More about magic journals in later editions.

-Rico

This newsletter is part of our Merry Month of Meditations series, bringing to you 10 newsletters in December in total!

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