The Premise Process
/I’d like you to reconcile two ideas from separate questions in today’s post.[Mailbag #56].
The first question in that post talks about your “Photographic Absorption” premise.
Then in the next question/answer you talk about the mistakes people make with Audience-Centric magic and you say that one of the mistakes they make is that they choose a premise the audience cannot understand at all because it’s unrelated to any concept they understand. You use the question, “Is this a thing?” to ask if it’s a good premise. But “photographic absorption” isn’t a thing, so why would that be a good premise?
While I have you, what do you find to be the best way to come up with ideas for premises? If there is a process you use for that sort of thing.—BI
I see your point. The term “photographic absorption” is made up. But the concept that you can look at a photograph and have that affect your mental state is something that has a basis in reality. So we’re building on something people understand. The magical turn in that presentation is the idea that going through some process can affect not just your internal state, but external factors as well. While that doesn’t have a basis in reality, it is an extension of something that does. Which, to my mind, is a perfectly good type of premise.
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In the original “Is this a thing?” post, I said: “My favorite types of premises/presentations are unbelievable, interesting, and familiar.” And I talked about looking for these sorts of concepts that already exist in the world. Things like time travel, ESP, haunted objects, etc.
But it’s actually fairly easy to come up with premises that meet those criteria in regards to any subject, even if it’s not inherently strange in the first place.
Here are the steps:
First you start with a concept or an object.
Make some sort of statement about the parameters of how that concept/object operates.
Change one of those parameters to make the statement untrue.
Use the now untrue statement as a premise for an effect or presentation.
For example, let’s say we want to do a trick related to the concept of “memory.”
We start with a statement related to memory.
You can take certain supplements to help you better recall your memories.
Now we change one detail of that statement to make it untrue.
You can take certain supplements to help you better recall other people’s memories.
And we now have the premise for a trick.
By starting off with a sentence that rings true and only changing one thing, you end up with something that still feels familiar, because it’s very similar to something that’s well understood. This keeps you tethered to reality in a way that makes for what I feel is a good premise, rather than just asking, “Is this thing I’m going to do impossible?” By that metric you end up with shit like Milk to Lightbulb. “I’m going to vanish milk and make it reappear in this light bulb,” has no relation to anything at all. It feels like you’re doing it simply because you have a way to do it. And, of course, you are.
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You can use this process with anything. I look out of my window now and I see a tree with bright red autumn leaves. What’s a fundamentally true statement I can say about this? In autumn, all the leaves on the tree change color from green to red. Now by changing any single parameter, we’ve got a decent premise for a trick. If we change “autumn” we have a trick where you make the leaves change color in the spring. By changing “all” you have a trick where only one leaf changes color, or maybe one selected leaf doesn’t change color. By changing, “green” we have a trick where the leaves change to blue or something.
Let’s do it with something else. Theres a lamp on my desk. What’s a statement I can make about this lamp? The lamp lights up when it is plugged in and electricity flows into it. Okay, now we change one parameter of that statement. The lamp lights up when it’s not plugged in. That’s okay. But just negating your original statement is probably not the best way to go about this. Instead, maybe we change the parameters in this way: The lamp lights up when sexual energy is fed into the cord. So instead of plugging it in, two lovers sandwich the end of the power cord between their hands. That’s a premise that works for me. We’re substituting in something for the electricity. But it’s not completely arbitrary. “Sexual energy” makes sense as a power source, at least in a fantasy word. We just changed one parameter: the type of energy a lamp needs.
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Now, let’s talk about a bad premise:
The card changed from blue to red because it was embarrassed.
Someone might say, “I did what you said. I took the concept that embarrassment causes people to turn red, and I just changed one thing: I put ‘playing cards’ in place of people.”
Yeah, sorry, no. That doesn’t count. People feel embarrassment. Not playing cards. So you’re introducing an entirely new object as the subject of your premise. When you do that, you’re just making your trick a symbolic exercise.
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Now, of course what I’m talking about here is sort of an easy way to generate premises, because you’re not limited by any given trick. It’s just an idea generating process.
Look at something: There’s a pumpkin outside my window.
Make a true statement about pumpkins: Pumpkins decompose about a week from when you carve them.
Change one parameter of that statement and you’ll have a trick idea.
Maybe it’s a trick where pumpkins don’t decompose, they recompose. And every night you swap out the pumpkin on your neighbor’s porch with a similar one except the image that was carved into it is a little smaller than the previous night. As if it’s healing. (That would be more of a weird, benevolent prank than it would be a trick.)
Or maybe you change “about a week” to “about a minute” and the audiences watches as the pumpkin decomposes in real time in front of you. “That wasn’t a trick with the pumpkin. It was a trick with time. We’re all ten days older than we were just moments ago.”
This is, I think, a pretty satisfying way to generate trick ideas using a particular concept or object.
But unless you’re creating a themed show, or something like that, you probably don’t not need to create a premise first, and then build a trick from that. Instead you probably have a trick that already exists and you need to come up with some premise for it. That is, admittedly, much harder.
But just coming up with premises (without tricks) attached is the first step I use. I come up with subjects that I think are interesting. Then I use this process to generate premises based on that subject. Then I keep a list of those premises and read through them from time to time, alongside a list of tricks that I haven’t quite found a premise for yet, and I look for any potential connecting fiber between the two lists.
It’s not automatic, but it puts you in a position to get lucky occasionally and match up a premise you like with a trick you have. This beats the option of just hoping for a bolt of inspiration to strike and to just have the perfect premise pop into your head. Sometimes that does happen. But it’s not a very actionable way to approach the process.