I have spent most of my adult life trying to be creative on demand, which is a lot like trying to be spontaneous on schedule. It rarely works when you want it to, and it almost always shows up when you’re busy doing something else.
Over the years, though, I’ve settled on a formula. Not a perfect formula — if you’re looking for perfect, you’re reading the wrong guy — but a workable one. Psychologists will tell you there are four stages of creativity: Preparation, Incubation, Sudden Insight, and Manifestation. I agree. I’ve just added a crucial fifth stage they left out.
Desperation.
Let me walk you through how this actually works in the real world, as opposed to how it works in books.
1. Preparation: Do the Sweaty Work
Gather everything. Facts, books, videos, gossip from other performers. If you’re building a new routine, find out if someone has done something similar before. Not so you can borrow it, but so you can make damned sure you don’t go down the same path.
When smart pros decide to add an effect to their show, they don’t buy one version. They buy every version they can get their hands on. Then they take the best bit from each and build something better. It’s expensive and it clutters up the garage, but it works.
Edison said genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. Which is a wonderful quote, although it is a little unsettling to picture someone that sweaty working that close to electricity. That joke is Bob Orben’s, by the way. I’ve been carrying it around for forty years because it still makes me laugh.
The point is, you can’t incubate what you haven’t prepared. If your cupboard is empty, nothing is going to sprout.
2. Incubation: Make Tea
This is the part where you do nothing. On purpose.
You’ve planted the seeds, so now you have to let them sit. Go for a walk. Play with the dog. Take a nap. Sleep on it. Your unconscious mind is terrible at taking orders but very good at rummaging around when you leave it alone.
Most magicians, me included, are terrible at this stage. We want to micromanage the idea to death. Don’t. Let all that research settle into something like a plan without you hovering over it.
My version of incubation usually involves the kitchen. I make tea. I drink it. I stare out the window and try not to fiddle.
3. Sudden Insight: Write It Down Before It Leaves
Eureka. Except it never happens when you’re nobly gazing into the distance in a lab coat. It happens in the bath. Under an apple tree. While you’re looking for your car keys.
And when it comes, it comes as a complete package — the line, the timing, the extra bit on the end — all shrink-wrapped and perfect. And it will disappear just as fast if you let it.
Write it down. Right then. On whatever is handy. I don’t care if it’s a cocktail napkin. I have learned the hard way that the first version your brain gives you is almost always the best one. You can change it later. You can improve it later. But if you don’t capture it, you’ll spend the next three days trying to remember a joke that was funnier than anything you’ll actually come up with.
4. Manifestation: Put It In The Show
This is where most of us stall. As Ben Franklin said, the way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.
Make the thing. Put it in the show. It will be rough. That’s fine.
Here’s what I’ve noticed after fifty-odd years of doing this: the first time you try a new chunk, it usually goes great. There’s adrenaline, there’s novelty, the audience feels you’re excited. The second, third, and fourth times? Often terrible. That’s normal. Don’t panic and throw it away.
Keep working it. Sometimes changing a single word or adding a beat — just one breath where there wasn’t one — turns a groaner into a howler.
Of course, there is a limit. If it doesn’t start to work in a reasonable amount of time, let it go. The performer who keeps something in because “this one’s just for me” is on the fast track to being disrespectful to the audience. They didn’t pay to watch you amuse yourself.
Which brings us to the real engine of all this.
5. Desperation: Mother of Invention
There is nothing like having your back against the wall to keep your feet moving forward. Desperation speeds up the first four stages like you wouldn’t believe.
Los Angeles, 1981. I’m sitting in our little apartment practicing a double lift, which is exactly as exciting as it sounds, when the phone rings. It’s the talent coordinator for The John Davidson Show. Big daytime talk show. National.
They’re taping a tribute to Hill Street Blues tomorrow, he says. Do I have a piece of magic that would fit a police theme?
“Absolutely,” I said.
I was lying. I had absolutely nothing.
But if someone offers you national TV, you say yes first and figure out the details later. That’s not bad advice for most of show business actually.
I had 23 hours.
So, I did what I always do when I’m panicking. I opened the Bible. In my case, the Bible is my battered, annotated, coffee-stained copy of McComb’s Magic: 25 Years Wiser.
Half a page in, Billy McComb — who never wasted a word — sketches an idea: what if you combined two standard tricks to make something new? His example was the Thumb Tie combined with Card in Wallet.
That was my Preparation. Five minutes.
I went into the kitchen and made tea. That was Incubation.
While the tea was steeping, I remembered I had a pair of old thumb cuffs in the magic cupboard. Real police hardware. I’d never used them. That was Sudden Insight.
I drank the second cup of tea and started rehearsing. The next day I was on television doing a brand-new routine where a signed card ends up locked inside a pair of thumb cuffs. It killed. I’ve been doing it for forty years since.
Notice what happened to the order? Desperation was first. The other four stages fell in line behind it because they had to. Life rarely gives you the courtesy of going in numerical order.
That 23-hour panic gave me a lifelong principle that I call Creativity Times Two: take two existing effects and smash them together until they become one better effect.
Let me give you another one.
The Shirt
I’m doing a corporate banquet in San Diego for Applied Micro Devices. The night before the show, I’m having a drink with the CEO and he starts telling me about a magician who stole a guy’s shirt right off his back in the middle of his act. He loved it.
“Can you do that?” he asks.
“Of course,” I say.
Again, lying. I knew how it was done. I’d never actually done it in a show. And now I’d promised it for tomorrow.
I didn’t want to make it a feature. I didn’t have the mileage to carry it. So I used the Times Two rule. I had a solid piece already in the set — my Coin in Vanishing Bottle routine. Signed half dollar appears inside a sealed Coke bottle. It’s a strong trick. Part of the handling is walking through the audience letting people see the coin rattling around inside.
It’s a necessary moment, but not exactly riveting.
Perfect place to hide something funny.
An hour before the show, I find a salesman sitting near the front, introduce myself, and say, “Your boss asked me to do a bit and I need a helper. Can you keep a secret?” Corporate audiences become remarkably cooperative when you mention their boss. He said yes.
I took him into an empty banquet room and set up the shirt pull. He went back to his table. No one knew.
During the show, I get to the bottle display. I wander the crowd, then stop. “Someone said they can’t quite see the coin,” I say. I peer at the bottle. “There’s a smudge on the glass. I can fix that.”
I walk straight to my pre-set guy, grab his shirt, rip it right off his back, polish the bottle with it, hand it back and say, “You can see it much better now.”
I never acknowledged what I’d just done. I just kept going.
The place went insane. It got a bigger laugh than anything else in the show, and it cost me maybe thirty seconds. It didn’t derail the routine, it gave the routine a reason to exist in that little dead spot where I was just showing a bottle around.
That’s the whole secret. Don’t think about how much time you can get out of a trick. Think about how much extra punch you can put into it. Lay audiences are not impressed by how long your routine is. It’s actually the reverse.
The Fellows Method
My old friend Robert Fellows, pictured above, is one of the most commercial magicians I know. He can do anything and make it play.
A few years ago, Dick Foster was casting his big Vegas production Spellbound and needed a mentalist. Every top mindreader in the country was pitched. Dick turned them all down. Too slow. Too serious. Too ponderous for a fast, flashy casino revue.
Then I get a call from Bob. “I’m auditioning for the mentalist spot next week.”
Bob had never done a dedicated mentalism act in his life.
He got the job. Instantly.
I asked him how. He laughed and said he’d done what manipulation acts have known for years. Jack Goldfinger didn’t just restore a torn newspaper — he restored it, got his applause, then crumpled it up and produced a white dove. Two punches for the price of one. No dead air.
Fellows built his whole mentalism act that way. Every revelation had a kicker built in. A book test that ended with the book vanishing. A drawing duplication that turned into a full-stage prediction. He realized the problem wasn’t mentalism — it was that mentalists were doing one trick where a Vegas show needed two.
Creativity Times Two, again. Only this time it wasn’t two tricks jammed together. It was a trick plus its own encore, delivered before the audience had time to stop clapping.
What To Do Monday Morning
If you take nothing else from this, take this:
1. When you want to add something, buy everything. Watch every version. Steal the thinking, not the trick.
2. Write down the first idea exactly as it arrives. You can edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank one you forgot.
3. Put it in the show before you think it’s ready. If you wait until it’s perfect, you’ll wait forever. If it bombs three times in a row, now you have real information.
4. When you have a weak moment in a strong trick, don’t add patter. Add a trick. That bottle display needed a laugh. The shirt gave it one. Two good moments became one great one.
5. Learn to love a deadline. Nothing focuses the mind like a TV booking tomorrow or a CEO who just asked for the shirt off someone’s back. Give yourself fake deadlines if you have to. “I will have a new opener by Friday” works better than “someday I’ll work on a new opener.”
Desperation is uncomfortable. It’s also incredibly efficient. I don’t recommend living there, but I do recommend visiting it on purpose now and then.
You already have the tricks. You’ve got drawers full of them. Go pull two out that have never met each other and introduce them.
You might be surprised what they get up to.
REMARKABLE MAGIC 