Mailbag #94
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I enjoyed reading your “Expansion” post of June 20. I agree with your premise totally. In fact, I characterize it as “expanding the time and space continuum”. In other words, by expanding either the time and/or space of the evolvement of a trick the more impactful it can be.
For example, I regularly perform “The Missing Mentalist” first created by Marvin Kaye in 1975 (with credit to Burling Hull) in which I hand a spectator a deck of cards, leave the room, instruct him to cut the deck into two, shuffle both, pick one pack and select a card and stick it in the other pack, place either pack into and envelope and carry home. In the course of two days or so I call him, tell him I am struggling but will figure out his card. Then BAM, the third day I call him with the name of his card.
What this method accomplishes is expand the trick from a few minutes to reveal to 3 days to build the suspense and then expand the space by distancing me from the spectator where the “magic” happens in his house with him holding half the cards.
Voila! Much more impressive and memorable than a quick reveal in person. —A
I’m not familiar with that specific trick, but in my experience, the logic behind what you’re suggesting is sound.
Obviously, you don’t want every trick you do to take days to wrap up, but it can be a powerful tool when used sparingly.
It can also make tricks more deceptive, as I wrote in this post on how I use an impression pad. If I have you draw something on a pad, then I pick up the pad and duplicate your drawing, that’s going to put a lot of heat on the pad itself. It has to, because the whole interaction has been very “pad-centric.” But if I have you draw something, tear out the drawing, put the pad away, and then, over the course of the evening, I engage in a handful of different interactions with you where I try different approaches to learn your drawing, then it becomes not all about the pad.
(For those of you who have the next book coming to you this October, you’ll find a fun example of “expansion” in action in a trick called Going On A Trip. It’s a trick I use when going on vacation or out of town with someone. It starts at home before we leave, climaxes days later when we’re on our trip, and a sort of kicker ending that happens when we get home. It’s a variation on a classic card trick that normally takes 75 seconds to perform.)
So, I'm having a bit of trouble with thumb writing. Specifically on the timing to write. I mean, I feel the moment you have to write the information is the worst moment to do so, because it's precisely the time between the moment they tell you the information and the moment of the reveal. I barely got away with it the last time I did it. There's some heat at the moment and I feel spectators are suspicious about why it takes me longer than what would be "normal" to reveal what I wrote.
I don't think it's the writing itself I'm having trouble with. I'm not super proficient, but I feel I can write at a good pace with legible writing. But hey, maybe I'm wrong and I need to get a lot better at this. I don't know.
Do you have any tips on this? Or maybe could you point me in the right direction? A book or even a video from a performance could be helpful. —RD
I don’t think I’ve had this issue when it comes to thumbwriting. But I do have some ideas that might be able to help.
First, you’ll want to decide if this is just a general technique or pacing issue. Most of the time when I’m doing any kind of thumbwriting, I’m just doing two numbers or letters. Maybe three. I can get this done in the time it takes me to say, “You’ve got to be kidding me,” or, “You’re not going to believe this.” And saying something like that makes perfect sense in that space after they tell you the number, but before you turn around the card.
Does that feel right to you? Or does that feel like not enough time. It probably should be enough time if you’re writing just a couple characters. So that might be a technique issue.
You can easily triple that amount of time if you don’t ask for the information directly. For example, if instead of asking for a single two-digit number, I ask two people each for a two-digit number, then add them together in my head. I then have these beats in which to write the number down.
“Okay, so the total of those two numbers would be?”
A moment for them to answer.
“You’re not going to believe this.”
You can do the same thing with initials. If I’m performing for someone named Julie Dietrich, and I’m going to predict the initials of her first crush, I can write this on the card:
JD
❤️’s
And leave a space on the bottom to write her crush’s initials. But instead of asking for their initials, I can ask for his first name (write initial), ask if she remembers his last name, get the last name, then write in his last initial while I say, “So his initials would be…?” And wait for her to answer.
What I don’t like as a means to buy time is when magicians do this. “Name any two-digit number… 44? Oh, why did you name that number?” Then it just seems like stalling because it’s a question that takes the momentum away from the revelation. Whereas, a simple statement like, “I can’t believe this happened again,” is building anticipation toward the revelation.
Another technique you can use if you need to buy more time sounds like this:
“I want you to imagine opening a dictionary and flipping to any page and finding a simple one syllable word there. What word are you looking at in your imagination. Door? Seriously? Did you look at what I wrote down here?”
Accusing someone of something is great misdirection. People’s natural instinct is to defend themselves. And it’s psychologically very convincing because in the process of defending themselves they’re cementing in the notion that there was something on the other side for them to see in the first place.
Ultimately, it’s going to depend on what the routine is, but those are some of the ideas/techniques I use when building in the necessary delay with secret writing.