Dear Jerxy Week - Day 4: New to Mentalism
/I’ve been recently getting serious about mentalism and trying to invent my own stuff, but I’ve run in to some problems (probably due to inexperience) so I figured I’d ask you some questions, if possible.
(1) How do you pick what method to use, or even invent new methods in the first place? I feel like I’m far better at thinking of premises than actually figuring out how to make what I want to happen happen.
(2) How do you know if something you’ve come up with will fool people? Maybe this is just an experience thing but I feel like there must be some sort of baseline test. —HF
(1) How do you pick what method to use, or even invent new methods in the first place?
You really answered this question in your first paragraph. The issue is a lack of experience. If you’re new to mentalism (or any branch of magic) before worrying about working on your own routines and methods, you need to familiarize yourself with what’s possible already. I’m not trying to stifle your creativity and suggest you only need to do what’s already been done. In fact, get a notebook and keep track of all the ideas you have so you can get back to them later. But before you start working on those ideas you need to invest a good amount of time learning as many methods and concepts as you can. If not, you’re going to end up spending a lot of time:
a) working on stuff that’s genuinely not possible
b) re-inventing stuff that’s already been created.
So you need to spend time getting your fundamentals in order. How much time? I have no clue. I was involved in magic for 15 years before I started regularly coming up with my own tricks. But I also wasn’t really trying to. If you haven’t been doing much mentalism to this point, spend a year or two focusing on the basics.
As you do this, if you’re naturally creative, you’ll start coming up with your own spin-off ideas from the basics. Most of these ideas will already have been thought of, but that’s okay, you’re giving yourself practice coming up with doable new ideas (even if they’re not new to the world, they’re new to you).
So you’re doing two things simultaneously. You’re keeping track of the ideas you have for tricks in a notebook and you’re learning and performing the basic methods and effects. Once you’re at that intermediate level of mentalism, then you can look back at your notebook of ideas you’ve been keeping and you can fit those presentations into the classic methods of which you now have a firm understanding. Or you might find out that there is no classic methodology that can be used to create the effect you imagined. At that point, you can either devote yourself to coming up with a brand-new method or resign yourself to the fact that if the greatest minds in magic haven’t cracked that nut yet, then maybe it’s uncrackable.
Again, I’m not trying to discourage you from creating a brand new method. It’s just not how I do it. The few times in my life I’ve come up with a completely new method for something, it came to me with no effort on my part. It just came to me out of the blue.
When it comes to creating something “new” in magic/mentalism, my focus is on premises and contexts and ways to incorporate magic into day-to-day life. And what allows me to focus on those things in a semi-productive way is a firm understanding of the basics.
(2) How do you know if something you’ve come up with will fool people?
The only way is to test it.
You might be uncomfortable showing something to someone without knowing if it will fool them or not. That’s understandable. Here’s what I’d recommend…
What you don’t want to say is, “Can I test this new magic trick I came up with on you?”
You don’t want it to sound like your ego is on the line. Depending on who you’re performing for, they might be hesitant to give you honest feedback.
Instead say something like, “Hey, can I try something with you? I was reading this article online about this concept in magic [or psychology, or gambling, or however you frame it]. I’m a little confused by it. I want to try it out and see if it really works.”
Now you’ve asked them for their feedback on this thing which you have nothing to do with. It’s just something you’re trying out.
At the end, when you get their feedback, they might say, “Well, don’t most people say ‘Rose’ when you ask them to name a common flower?”Or whatever weak idea your trick is based on.
Then you just say, “Exactly! That’s the thought that I had when I first read the article.” You see? It wasn’t your dumb idea. It was the article’s!
Road testing a new method is really the only way to know how it will play for others.
But you may not even need to get to that point if you can be really honest with yourself. This is not a skill many magicians possess. Or maybe it’s lacking in most humans—not just magicians. For example, when I see someone “levitating” a bill and it’s clearly wobbling on a tiny piece of thread, this seems to be someone who is dishonest with themselves. Because certainly if they imagine themselves without any of their magic knowledge watching that effect, they would assume it’s dangling from something they can’t quite see, yes? They wouldn’t be like, “I saw a dollar jiggling in the air and now I’m questioning the fundamentals of physics as we know it.” If you can put yourself in your layman’s brain and realize that it wouldn’t fool you, then it probably won’t fool others.
However, if you think it would fool you, that’s not good enough. When it comes to assessing the strength of a new method or a significant variation on an existing one, you can’t just trust your own judgment. You nee to test it. As famous birthday party clown, Richard Feynman, once said about this: "The first rule is you must not fool yourself. And you are the easiest one to fool."