30 Magic Trick Hooks You Can Steal for Yourself

Look, I get it – my granddad taught me magic, too. But we can't always be talking about our granddads every time we perform magic.

I've worked on a lot of TV magic shows, and I always recommend that magicians focus on beats rather than dialogue.

The truth is that acting is actually really, really hard.

Derren Brown is probably one of the best actors in the world at making every night on stage feel totally unique and unscripted.

Famous magicians often work with professional acting coaches, and even still, a lot of them choose to rely on beats over scripting.

The next time you see David Blaine perform magic, notice that each time he performs the same trick, the scripting changes, but he always hits the important beats. He takes a moment at the same point in each performance to remind the spectators that they had a free choice or that he hasn't gone anywhere near the cards – but the wording of his script changes each time.

Equally, there are some great rare examples of magicians who script their tricks to an extreme, like Barry & Stuart. When you watched them perform, you knew and actually appreciated how delicately they'd considered every word.

Scripting makes a lot of sense for double acts, both in terms of practicality and also in the minds of the audience – of course, there's a script; there are two of them!

Most magicians reading this will always perform more comfortably if you focus on the beats instead of the scripting. And, honestly, even if you want to write a script, you should start with the bullet-pointed beats.

Write each beat out for the whole routine, and then below it, in italics, write the reason for each beat – if you can't think of a good reason for that beat, then you need to delete it. And don't just include the beats the audience sees, add actions like a pause, or a timestamp like a specific gesture to lock in the time at which the magic happens for your friends.

I've written a lot about time stamping magic before and still think it's an underused magic technique. A simple coin vanish is 10x better if you use time stamping to make the spectator believe the coin is vanishing at a specific moment.

Starting with beats also helps you "show – don't tell" in your routine. We've all seen a magician haplessly describe every step of their routine out loud: "This is a perfectly ordinary deck of cards, and we're going to take your card and place it in the middle of the deck, and then it will jump to the top of the deck, and we'll do that again now."