When someone wants to improve at a skill or sport they must go through a series of things in order to improve at it. They must understand the How, When, Where, and Why behind the skill they wish to learn and then they must practice to build the needed confidence and dexterity to execute the skill flawlessly every time. Magic is no different!

When we are learning how to do magic we go through four different stages before it could be said that we’ve mastered an effect. Those stages are: Unconscious Incompetence, Conscious Incompetence, Conscience Competence, and Unconscious Competence. Take any effect you’ve ever learned, you’ve gone through those four stages on your way to mastery of that effect. Lets take an ambitious card for example. You start out in unconscious incompetence. You are unaware of the effect, or how it can benefit your act. After watching it performed once, you now are at a stage of conscious incompetence. You are aware of it, but you don’t know how to do it yet. You purchase the effect, and practice it enough to perform it. You have passed into the conscious competence stage. Lastly, you get so good at performing it you can do it without thinking about what your hands are doing. You’ve now reached the final stage of learning a new skill, that is unconscious competence.

It is important in magic to be at the level of unconscious competence with everything you do in your act. When you perform you want to be able to focus on your presentation and audience management and not on how you are going to get the card to do the next “move”. Your focus in practice should be getting to the point of mastering each piece in your act so that you can perform them effortlessly and without conscious thought as to what you are doing.

I. Practice

You’ve heard it said before: “Practice makes perfect.” And practice you must! There are three ways you can practice to improve your skills. You can practice in front of a mirror, in front of a live study partner, or in front of a video camera. All three have their benefits, and draw backs. I’ll cover each of them.

Mirrors: Mirrors have a lot more use to magicians other than to hide the girl from view in an apparently empty box. They give you a cheap way to get a view of what the audience sees when you are performing your effects. While the bathroom mirror is great, you may want to consider purchasing a smaller more portable one so that you can be in a more comfortable area than huddled over the bathroom sink straddling the toilet trying to figure out if your 5 speed looks clean. I keep a small mirror in my travel bags when ever I perform abroad, just in case the hotel one isn’t suitable to my comfort levels. They are also fairly cheap to buy too.

Study Partners: Study Partners can be your Parents, Best Friends, Wife, Husband, Siblings, co-workers, boss, whoever you need. They are a close confidant with whom you can trust your secrets to. People who have no general interest in magic make the best Study Partners. They can be brutally honest, give you the best critique about your act, and let you know if something doesn’t “look” right. They may not know it’s called the uber secret ultra Marlo backwards magnetic tilt pass, but they will know that “thing” you just did with the deck of cards didn’t feel natural. I love my wife for this reason. Being an engineers daughter she sees through everything and can usually give me better critique than what I would get at a jam session down at the local magic shop. If for no other reason than she’s still technically a layman.

Video Cameras: Nothing is more brutally honest than a video camera. Trust me the camera sees everything and unlike your best friends (whom may be concerned about your pride) the camera doesn’t lie. The nice thing about video taping yourself is you get a chance to watch not only your handling from an audience perspective but you can also listen to the verbal patter and watch how your body emotes during the act. Video Cameras can be a costly investment, the lower end ones are going for two to three hundred but with the growing popularity of web cams it’s becoming easier to record yourself for quick review and playback for an investment that won’t break the piggy bank. Most cellular phones now days can actually record video with fairly good clarity.

I want to take a minute to digress about a subject that I know we all feel strongly about; YouTube. I can’t recall how many threads I see on a weekly bases pop up around magic websites that usually has the poster ranting about the blatant exposure of magic on the internet either by direct intent or horrible presentations of popular effects available on the current market. Sadly, I don’t think there is anything that can be done to stop this trend from happening but I do want to point out something that does contribute to it. Don’t post videos of what would be considered practice level performances on the internet! Recording yourself is great! Keeping the files on your computer for easy access and playback works wonders, but they have no place on the internet. If you want to post a video to the internet, make sure the performance is solid, the handling clean, and the patter thought out, rehearsed, scripted, and delivered. You may not be able to stop the flow of exposure videos from being released on websites like YouTube but you at the least won’t be contributing to them.

Like anything else that you want to do well, you should get in the habit of practicing magic daily. Most working professionals acts are either 25 minutes long, 45 minutes long, or 55 minutes long. I’ve known girls who spend more time in the bathroom getting ready for an event than what it takes to perform an act from start to finish. Just like exorcise or playing a musical instrument I recommend you warm up and stretch before you go into your routine. Stretch your hands, fingers, and wrists. Loosen up your fingers by wiggling them or shaking them out, and practice doing several different styles of cuts and shuffles before starting. Get out a coin and do a coin roll across each hand, then attempt to separate four coins between your fingers for each hand. After you’ve warmed yourself up, then go into your routine and perform it strait through. Focus on any effect or part of an effect that you don’t feel comfortable with, if need be reference any source material you have; be it book or DVD. Also make sure to stretch and warm up before any gig! Run through a few practice card tricks on a waiter or stage hand before you take the stage. Use this time to get the nerves and anxiousness out of your system. That way when you finally do get on stage you’re ready to kill. Believe me it works wonders!

As a magician I’ve never been “off”. Everywhere I go, every person that I meet is just another chance to make a lasting impression and create that one special moment that someone will cherish for the rest of their lives. I always have a deck of cards on me or a coin. Most of the time I carry both, much to my wife’s chagrin. I have always thought that if I’m going to be always ready to perform then I should also in turn be always ready to practice. So I do. In lines for the movies, when I’m riding passenger in someone’s car, when I’m shopping for groceries, at work, at home, where ever. I pull out my cards or my coins and just go through my warm ups and maybe a few basic slights. I’ve found that it really has made my card and coin handling tighter over all. It also has an interesting bi-product: Recognition. People see the cards or the coins and they get curious. They always ask if I’m a magician or something, of which I haply reply “Want to see some magic?” Next thing I know I’ve met some wonderful people and I’ve got potential prospects for booking a gig. All from just practicing! Do yourself the favor, put a deck of cards in your back pocket, shove a dollar or 50 cent piece in your wallet and practice anywhere, anytime, that’s convenient for you! You’ll be impressed with how much you’ll improve over a short amount of time.

II. Theory

Having the skills, the knowledge and the props to perform miracles will do you no good if you don’t understand how they work. Magic is 90% presentation and 10% technique. If you want to improve yourself as a magician and an artist then I highly recommend you devote just as much of your time studying theory as you do learning the effects themselves. It’s just as important to know why the effect is magical as to how its done. There are a lot of great books out there that you can read. I suggest Ken Weber’s “Maximum Entertainment”, Aye Jaye’s “The Golden Rule of Schmoozing” or Ortiz’s “Strong Magic” for starters. I’m not going to go extensively into theory here in this essay, as it is beyond the scope of this work, but I will say this. Your job as a magician is to entertain. To entertain you need to convey yourself, and your message to the audience in such a way that you create lasting and memorable experiences for those that watch you. They should feel strong emotions when they see your act. You should be able to make them laugh, cry, rejoice, and be startled at what you do. If you fail to engage the spectator both mentally and emotionally then you are robbing them of a full experience. A good magician knows why his magic is effective and not just how to do it.

As a side note I would also encourage you to read up on the history of magic and the careers of the magicians upon whose shoulders modern magic has been built. “Hiding the Elephant” is a great look at magic from the late 1800’s to modern times. There are also countless books available on Vernon, Blackstone, Houdini, Malini, Chung Ling Soo, and many more.

III. The Secret Move

“Stop that! You’re giving the audience the impression of a ‘secret move’.” Is a saying I would hear constantly from Rich Cowley. He used to be a friend of mine when I was still a neophyte member of the Magic Castle close to three years ago. I regret that we don’t share a close friendship any longer, but the lessons he taught me are none the less invaluable. Rich had a thing for knowing how to present card and coin magic to laymen. His movements were so natural and so well justified that even knowing full well what he was going to do, and when (give or take a beat) he did it, I still had difficulties catching him. Richs presentations of magic was as close to the real thing as I think anyone could get. Rich drilled into my head the concept of making magic fluid and natural, and you know what? He had a point. When you perform magic you should strive to remove all unnecessary movements, or patter that takes away from the effect. Your moves should be natural and seamless. When you are practicing a slight, say a shuttle pass for example, then the move should look identical when you actually do the slight as opposed to when you actually pass the coin from hand to hand for real. When you perform weak magic the spectators fall out of trance of wonderment you’ve worked so hard to put them in and into an analytical evaluation of your act. They will look for and scrutinize every bit of movement and patter you deliver in effort to catch you in the act of doing your monkey business. The problem with weak magic is, it doesn’t matter if the spectator is right or wrong about how you achieved the effect. The only thing that matters is that in their mind they know you did “the secret move”. That’s a position you don’t ever want to be in. When you practice, you want to make sure that you do nothing to indicate that a “secret” move is being done. All movements should be justified, simple, direct and to the point. This may cause you to rework your entire presentation, even get a new handling of a certain pet effect but trust me, it’s worth it! Rich, if you can read this, Thank You.

IV. Don’t Run Stock

Every time you buy a magic trick it comes with instructions on how to perform it, and usually some patter to use. If you perform the trick as it is written in the instructions and use the patter line for line then you are “running stock.” If you want to take your magic to the next level and improve as a magician you need to break away from running stock. You need to come up with your own effects, your own handling, and your own presentations. This isn’t an easy thing to do, and this is the border line that separates the artists from the rest of the herd. I personally recommend taking a trip to the good will store and just spending an afternoon in there. Look at everything, and try to think what kind of magic could be done using just every day items. When you learn a new trick, just learn the moves that make the trick work, throw away the patter, and write your own! It may take longer to get a trick from purchase to stage, but when you do it will be your effect, and you’ll be a lot prouder of a magician for it.

V. Understand Who You Are

It is important to understand who you are as a person, and who your character is as a magician. Everyone should have a character while they perform, even if this character is just them turned up a few degrees. Your magic that you perform should reflect your character. When you begin to understand what kind of character you are as a magician you’ll also begin to understand why certain effects work better in your arsenal than others. If you are a kids party magician who does a lot of clowning and light hearted comedy tricks, and you wonder why you get vacant stares when you perform a bullet catch it’s because the bullet catch probably doesn’t fit with the theme of your character.

The thing that sucks about this is you are going to have to make a sacrifice as a magician. You may end up having to cut a favorite routine out of your act because it just doesn’t fit your style or who you are. When you build your act you need to first identify who your performance character is. Are you comical, dark, serious, all cards, close up, stage, a clown, etc? Once you’ve done that then you need to focus on putting effects into your act that build on that theme. The theme could be anything, carnival, circus, cards, coins, street magic, what ever. The important thing is to not include anything that doesn’t fit that theme or your character. You’re going to end up with a considerably shorter list of magical effects than what you really know how to perform. This is a good thing! You’ve just established the skeletal framework for which you will build your act on. Now the only thing left to do is flesh out the act by adding patter, jokes, and additional effects that keep within the theme and character structure. When your done, video record yourself performing your new act, and then put it on a shelf for a few days. Watch the tape a few days later and critique your performance. Tweak or change anything that you feel is off, and repeat the process until you’ve got an act your proud of.

Note: As you are developing your act you want to make sure you are fully aware of where the magic takes place in each effect that way you can make sure to maximize your audiences entertainment of your act and truly create those lasting memories for them.

VI. Watching Others

The final bit of advice I can give for improving as a magician and taking your act to the next level is to watch others in your field work. Go online, YouTube, Clubs, Magic Societies, Theaters, where ever you have access too and watch others work. Critique their performances. Try to see what they do, why they do it, and what the audiences reactions are to it. Don’t steal their patter or their illusions, but take away from it a deeper understanding of how it works for who their character is, and then apply the same principles to your magic. If you want to improve then identify who in the business is doing magic better than you, figure out what they are doing to be better, and then strive to make the changes necessary in your life, or habits to reproduce the same effects for yourself.

All the best to you! And we’ll see you next essay.

William Draven.