New Blog from Sean Taylor

What keeps me up at night?

Episode 1 – The Adaptors

Inventing or creating magic isn’t easy. If it was, everyone would do it and we’d have even more crap coming out every week than we do now. Sturgeon’s law which reliably informs us that 90% of everything is crap, is alive and well in magic. If you were to look at the catalogues of 20 years ago, 10 years and even 1 year ago, you’ll see hundreds of tricks which were heralded as the next big release and now inhabit the discount lists and show up in the magic shop auctions.

The question then is how do you invent good magic? I’ve discussed this with many friends over the years and it’s a question I’ve also posed to some of magic’s great creators. Richard Sanders, Guy Hollingworth, Juan Mayoral and others who I’ve been lucky to spend time with all agreed that the best starting point is the effect. You begin with an idea of what you want to create and then set about developing a method. That of course is the hardest thing to do. If we consider card magic, we have to thank Vernon, Marlo, Elmsley, Jennings and really just a handful of other greats for developing so many plots. Without their prodigious output we wouldn’t have ambitious card, brainwave, travellers, collectors and all of those other ideas on which so much modern card magic is built. Card magicians are starting with one of those plots and asking themselves questions. What if this could be done without a table? What if we didn’t need to palm a card? What if there were no extra cards? What if it could be done in the spectator’s hands? These are not so much creations as adaptations and it’s fair to say that many of magic’s so-called creators are really just adaptors, good adaptors but adaptors, nevertheless.

I’ll admit it, I’m an adaptor. I’ve released my fair share of adaptations over the years so it’s not that I believe there’s anything fundamentally wrong with adapting the plots of others; I just feel that for something to be worthy of commercial release, you should be pushing the plot forwards or significantly advancing the methodology. If you aren’t doing these things, the fact that something has a magnet instead of a piece of elastic is all a bit pointless. It’s not really helping anyone. You won’t sell many and you haven’t added any real value. Those of you who know my work well will know that my commercial releases have all spent time in my various acts. They were all developed first and foremost for professional performance. I never set out to invent magic for commercial release, rather it was an accidental benefit of thinking deeply about the tricks I was performing and trying to think of ways to improve them.

Let’s look at an example of where I’ve done this and the journey that lead me there. One of the plots I’ve had a fascination with is Eddie Joseph’s Premonition and I’ve published three versions of it in 20 years. The basic plot is this. A spectator names any card, 1 in 52. The magician removes a pack and counts the cards. There are 51 and the card named by the spectator is missing from the pack. It’s a clever, if not terribly entertaining trick. When you reach the end, the finale is nothing, something isn’t there. Whilst it is clever, there’s no plot resolution as such. Over the years, there have been versions with 2, 4 and even 8 decks which have focused on making the method cleaner. I published 2 versions myself which were similar to an idea by Phantini – Gene Gordon - which used a single pack. (My specific method, which I still think is clever, was shared with a couple of dealers who were trying to buy the rights. It was disappointingly later released exactly as I had designed, without my knowledge by a dealer in Europe). I’d focused up to that point, like so many others before me, on the method.

What I should have been doing with Premonition was to look more closely at the effect, which is really where the flaws lie. If you sat around and asked smart magicians how to improve the effect, it wouldn’t take long for someone to suggest that the missing card should turn up somewhere else. In a wallet, in the card box, in your pocket etc etc. That gives the effect the necessary lift at the end and resolves the conflict in the story. One of the fundamental rules in the old showmanship books was that you shouldn’t end on a vanish. (Incidentally, I never liked the 13 in Copperfield’s show for this very reason). I had played for a while with a version which paired the deck with a brainwave or ultra-mental deck to give me the kicker. This was heading in the right direction but still didn’t quite get me home. What I needed was a way to cleanly force a single red backed card from a blue backed deck. That would give me a way to bring the effect home with an unexpected kicker. In playing with the methodology for the card to vanish from the primary deck, I’d realised that the most common method employed (that of having 2 identical banks of 26 cards) could be adapted to reduce the repetitive nature of the cards by having fewer duplicates. The fewer I had, the easier the forcing was going to become. At that point, I recalled a method for forcing a card face up from an old David Regal publication and that gave me the solution I was looking for. Marrying these ideas allowed me to ‘create’ On Target which has been one of my most popular releases of the last decade. I love to perform this at lectures and it’s a real fooler. The folks at Alakazam have done a tremendous job of getting it out there.

Another similar plot line I’ve played with extensively is that of having a single card named and that card having a unique property over all the other cards. My great friend Clifford Warne and I discussed this plot many times. So often in card magic, there are tricks where the selection is obviously 1 in 4, 1 in 13 or 1 in 26 which is not as impressive as 1 in 52. There are also numerous tricks with an awkward limiting procedure. What is often called Equivoque or magician’s choice (even when its often no such thing). These can look good, but they can often be a little transparent. So, the naming of ANY card does allow for a freedom in performance. Examples of where I’ve exploited this are Pineapple Surprise (itself an adaptation of a trick called Peaches by Peter Kane), The Crazy Man’s Marked Deck which is still my biggest selling effect after 20 years and ONE which is my version of the Fogel/Shaxon Invisible Card in Envelope from MindCoaster. My relentless pursuit of this plot has produced some excellent magic which I still use regularly in my performances.

So, the lesson from all of this is to look at the many effects that you have in your magic drawers and to ask yourself the question why they haven’t made it into your performances. Something attracted you to the trick in the first place and somehow its not lived up to its original promise. If it’s because the method is too difficult, too obvious or too contrived, how can it be improved or replaced? If it’s because the plot or premise doesn’t suit you, how you can you change the presentation to make it more suited to your style of work? If it’s because the props look odd in some way, how can you have them remade? I’ve taken dealer items to picture framers, sign makers, designers, photographers, printers, carpenters, welders, metal benders, electronic experts and numerous others over the years and had them remade to suit my exact purposes. This has often cost me four or five times the amount that it cost to buy the original prop but what I got in the end was something which did exactly what I wanted and looked exactly as I wanted it to. Among these pages you’ll find FlipOut which was an effect I adapted for Xerox over 15 years ago and it’s a been a real winner in my corporate presentations since then.

The other thing you need to do is to share your frustrations with fellow magicians. Really try to think outside the square between a group. Write all the ideas, no matter how crazy they are down and then work out which direction to take it. Often a trick can morph into something quite different from where it began.

The biggest trick I’ve ever created was a mentalism effect for the 4 man show I helped produce in 2008 called Out of Your Mind. It took four of us to create the trick, it used a laminated map of the world as big as the stage, a lawn blower, ping pong bats, 250 paper aeroplanes (all different), a miniature handbag, two pairs of protective goggles, a 747 sound effect, a song by Frank Sinatra and a unique forcing method using luggage tags by Roy Johnson. The routine went for 10 minutes and required all four of us to be involved throughout. Now, I’m not suggesting you go off and adapt that, but I can say that it all began with the idea that we’d have everyone in the audience create a paper plane and, with our instructions, and throw it onto the stage. Working with other performers allows your ideas to take flight if you excuse the terrible pun.

Happy adapting!

Sean Taylor 

Oct 2021