The Fitzkee Structure

In last week’s Taxonomy post, I included Dariel Fitzkee’s list of the various types of magic effects.

• Production (appearance, creation, multiplication)

• Vanish (disappearance, obliteration)

• Transposition (change in location)

• Transformation (change in appearance, character or identity)

• Penetration (one solid through another)

• Restoration (making the destroyed whole)

• Animation (movement imparted to the inanimate)

• Anti-gravity (levitation and change in weight)

• Attraction (mysterious adhesion)

• Sympathetic Reaction (sympathetic response)

• Invulnerability (injury-proof)

• Physical Anomaly (contradictions, abnormalities, freaks)

• Spectator Failure (magician's challenge)

• Control (mind over the inanimate)

• Identification (specific discovery)

• Thought Reading (mental perception, mind reading)

• Thought Transmission (thought projection and transference)

• Prediction (foretelling the future)

• Extrasensory Perception (unusual perception, other than mind)

While I don’t see too much value in the list as just a categorization of magic tricks, I think you could utilize the list as part of a dramatic structure for a long-running “storyline” in your magical endeavors.

I’ve suggested in the past that creating some continuity to your magic performances is a powerful way to get people hooked into seeing and hearing about your tricks. If everything is just some stand-alone piece of magic, there’s nothing intrinsically keeping them interested from the trick you show them one day to another.

But let’s say you have a close friend, a spouse, a roommate, or whatever, that you see regularly. And what if you introduced this list to them as something you were tackling? Maybe as a personal project. Or maybe you need to work your way through this list before gaining acceptance into some secret society. Or you have to show proficiency in each of these areas before certain other secrets are revealed to you. You can make the story behind why you’re tackling this list as believable or outlandish as you like.

But now you have a structure that allows you to show them 19 tricks—perhaps over a year or two of time—that don’t need to be tied together in any way other than the over-arching storyline of you working your way through the list. They’re witnesses to you accomplishing this goal. It gives the magic tricks themselves a greater meaning.

To add some drama to it, there should be failures and setbacks along the way. For example, maybe vanishes just aren’t your thing. They don’t come naturally to you. So you place a half-dollar on your left palm and wave your right hand over it. “Can you still see it?” you ask. They can. You try it again. Still no luck. You skip it for now on the list. You try it again a couple of months later. It doesn’t vanish again. Sometime down the line, you try it with a peanut instead of a coin. “The lighter density might help,” you suggest. The peanut doesn’t vanish either. You continue working your way through the list in the meantime. Until one day you’ve finished everything but that goddamn vanish. “I’m just going to focus on it for the next week and see if I can get it,” you tell the person who has been with you through this journey.

The next time you see them, you place the coin on the palm of their hand and wave your hands over it and…

It’s still there.

Shit.

Okay. One more time. Slowly you wave your hands over the coin and it completely vanishes.

You let out a guttural grunt and slump down, resting your hands on your knees. “Fucking finally,” you exclaim.

That build-up makes it actually worth getting a Raven rigged up in your jacket to vanish the coin.

The Raven is a beautiful coin vanish, but it’s over so quickly. This structure turns it into a 17-month coin vanish. It has so much more weight to it.

You might think, “Ah, my wife barely likes magic tricks. She’s not going to want to watch me work my way through this list.”

Okay, fine. But does she like you? This structure makes the story about reaching a goal, which everyone can relate to. Not just random tricks.

You might not like weightlifting, but if your best friend asked you to spot him for a few minutes once a month while he worked on achieving a personal goal for his deadlift, you’d go out in the garage and help him out. And you’d be invested (unless you’re a total self-absorbed piece of shit). And when he finally reached his goal of deadlifting double his body weight, you’d be psyched even if you never gave one second’s thought to weightlifting ever again.

Creating a broader narrative for your tricks to live within will ratchet up the interest level of anyone who watches this play out. The Fitzkee list is a great structure to do this.

Contranym

This idea is for English speakers only.

I think there’s a trick to be found in the concept of “contronyms.” This is when the same word has two opposite meanings.

At first, I thought there might be some way to use them subtly in some Third Wave Equivoque-style statements. There may be, but I haven’t figured that out yet.

You could probably build a little act around using this concept more overtly. If you’re the sort of person who puts together “acts” with high-concept themes.

You could have different trick titles and then let the spectator/audience determine what the title means.

For example, “The Cleaved Rubber Band”- Which definition of “cleave” do they want to use? And then you either link the rubber band to something or split it in two.

Or you could have them count ten coins into your hand which you close into a fist. “This trick is called, ‘Three Coins Left.’ What do you want that title to mean? That three coins have gone? Or that three coins remain?” Whatever they choose you is what you make happen.

For a finale, you could do an escape. Have yourself tied to a chair.

As you’re getting tied, you narrate the process.

“My hands are bound. My feet are bound. My chest is bound.”

As a curtain is raised up, you say, “I am bound.”

The curtain drops and you’re free.

“Bound for home, bitches! See ya!” And you scamper away.

And yes, I know rubber band tricks and escapes aren’t generally in the same show. I’m brainstorming, stupid. Leave me alone.

Mailbag #86

I really love your routining for Hide-A-Key from Love Letters #10. It rounds out the effect in such a satisfying way.

Have you had any issue with anyone questioning the key itself? Does it look like a legitimate key to you?—LO

While I haven’t performed this trick hundreds, or even dozens, of times, in all the times I have performed it, I’ve never had anyone comment on the key looking strange or anything like that. And I perform for the sort of people who would call me out on such a thing.

In the U.S., at least, this style of key is pretty ubiquitous. Double-sided keys like this were mandated for cars over 30 years ago. So people here are familiar with the style/shape of key. (Of course, now most cars don’t have actual keys at all. But this key style is still familiar to people.)

While I wouldn’t perform this for a locksmith, I’m pretty comfortable showing it to anyone else without them questioning it.

You just need to ask yourself, does the key look strange to you? If so, then maybe you shouldn’t get it, because apparently, you’re from an area where this key type isn’t common. But it didn’t even raise an eyebrow from me when I first saw it (and I’m usually hyper-critical about the look of magic props).

Keys are so unstandardized, that it would be unusual, I think, for someone to think something was off, just based on looking at the key. If they ask (which they probably won’t) tell them it’s for your gym locker or storage locker or something other than a house key or car key.

Now, once the key vanishes, they might have some suspicion about the key itself, but they’d have that regardless of what it looked like.

With the version of Hide-A-Key I perform, the focus is more on the reappearance than solely the vanish. The structure used in that effect would be inexplicable to people even if you performed it with a mysterious ball of goo. So if you do it with something that looks even vaguely like a normal key-like, you shouldn’t have a problem.

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What is your writing schedule like? How do you block out your time? I’m embarking on writing my first novel and I just don’t know how to schedule things out. —JP

I have a very complicated writing system I use to manage all the different outlets I end up writing for: the book, the newsletter, the site, and other professional writing gigs.

Getting too much into the weeds of the system I use probably won’t help anyone out. But I will tell you the general principle I follow, and this is what works for my brain. I overestimate the amount of time everything will take.

If, for example, I was planning on writing a novel of about 300 pages, I would estimate about 4 hours of work per page. I would then see how long it will take for me to find 300 4-hour blocks of time in my schedule. If I average one a day, then it will take me 10 months to write the book.

As I said, that’s an overestimate. It usually doesn’t take me 4 hours to write a page (although it has). By scheduling for the maximum amount of time I need, I end up feeling positive even if it takes me the maximum amount of time. And on days where I knock out that page in 60 or 90 minutes, there is a real sense of momentum and progress.

I know other people don’t work in this way. There is the old theory that work expands to fill the time you’ve allotted for it. But that’s not how my my brain operates. I’m more a follower of that U.S. Navy SEAL maxim: Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.

Dusting #83

Got a couple of credits to give in this post.

First, the trick I talked about in the March 21st post that summarized ideas from influence month likely comes from Clayton Rawson. He had a trick called, “The Time Forumla,” in Professional Magic Made Easy by Bruce Elliott. In that trick, a “formula” is written down, and then at the end, it’s shown that the reflection of the forumua says 8 of Spades.

His idea was to write “Jo 8” in script, over 23b692.

It’s probably easier to slip the version I suggested into something (that is, this string: 23b692708). Rather than try and include a division sign and the word “Jo” written in cursive. But it’s the same basic idea.

Thanks to Werner M. for the crediting note.

Just a quick note, if you ever do a trick like this (I’m thinking of Cryptext as an example of a similar trick) don’t write the letters/numbers so that things look perfect at the end. Write it so things look normal at the beginning. In other words, in the illustration above, the 3 is written like a backward E and the 6 has a little tail so it will look more like an “a” when it’s reversed. Writing it in some weird way takes away from the surprise at the end. Instead, write the letters and numbers so they look normal from the start, and then if you have to squint a little to “see” the reveal at the end, that’s fine.

You can see another example of the exact wrong way to do this type of reveal in this post.

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In the last issue of the newsletter, I wrote about an idea that I attributed to Joshua Quinn (via a post he made on facebook, and then via a friend who told it to me).

It turns out this idea was published by Michael Weber in a Journal of Psience bonus publication in 2020, called Hold the Phone.

If you have that sitting somewhere in your digital library, you may want to check it out. It’s a very clean scripting (of Tequila Hustler) to prevent the spectator from screwing up the effect and it also includes a nice Paul Vigil idea to frame the questions that lead into the effect.

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Great Moments In Magic Copywriting

From the trick Equalizer by Joao Miranda:

“Hearing is one of our most important senses.”

Indeed. Top 5 at the very least.

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RIP to Harry Lorayne

Harry was one-of-a-kind. And by that I mean he was a grade-A lunatic (which I mean as only a compliment). In his 90s and trolling the Magic Cafe for mentions of his name and chewing out any idiot who had the audacity to suggest a book or trick that wasn’t his. I loved him. I hope I’m as passionate about myself and my work at that age as he was.

Taxonomy

Kevin Parry’s video on the 10 types of magic tricks is really great.

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As a piece of art, I really enjoy that video. But is it useful in any way for us?

Magicians have been categorizing the different types of effects for at least a couple of centuries.

Here is Dariel Fitzkee’s list from The Trick Brain published in 1944

1. Production (Appearance, creation, multiplication)
2. Vanish (Disappearance, obliteration)
3. Transposition (Change in location)
4. Transformation (Change in appearance. character or identity)
5. Penetration (One solid through another)
6. Restoration (Making the destroyed whole)
7. Animation (Movement imparted to the inanimate)
8. Anti-Gravity (Levitation and change in weight)
9. Attraction (Mysterious adhesion)
10. Sympathetic Reaction (Sympathetic response)
11. Invulnerability (Injury proof)
12. Physical Anomaly (Contradictions, abnormalities, freaks)
13. Spectator Failure (Magicians' challenge)
14. Control (Mind over the inanimate)
15. Identification (Specific discovery)
16. Thought Reading (Mental perception, mind reading)
17. Thought Transmission (Thought projection and transference)
18. Prediction (Foretelling the future)
19. Extra-Sensory Perception (Unusual perception, other than mind)

While these sorts of lists are interesting, I think they’re a particularly magician-centric manner of looking at the tricks you do. Real, normal people aren’t really breaking down the tricks in this manner.

I’m not saying these categories aren’t “real,” I’m just saying they’re not useful. It’s like looking at the 7 basic story plots. In theory, that's a way to categorize stories, but I don’t know how useful it is to suggest that Dracula and Star Wars are somehow the same story.

If you do a card trick where the cards transpose, and then another one where certain cards transform to other cards, and then another one where cards vanish and reappear, those will end up merging in the spectator’s mind into one experience of “card tricks.”

However, if you transform a card from the Ace of Spades to the 2 of Hearts, and then transform an apple into a banana, those will be seen as two wildly different tricks to the spectator, simply because they use different objects.

Similarly, if you make coins appear, vanish, transpose, multiply, transform, etc., most spectators won’t feel like they’ve seen a wide variety of magic. They’ll feel like they’ve seen some coin tricks.

But you can take an appearance and put it into three different contexts and the person will have a distinct memory of three different tricks. 1) The Tibetan “Wishing Ritual” where the object they wished for appeared. 2) The time you hypnotized them to see an apple in the box that they had clearly seen empty just moments before. 3) The time you held a seance and the young spirit’s little dolly appeared on the table out of nowhere.

These are all they same “type” of trick (appearances). But they will be perceived as very different tricks and experiences for people because they’re three very different stories.

If you want to differentiate your effects for normal humans (not for magic researchers and historians) you will want to change up the props you use and the contexts/stories in which the tricks reside.

Those are the things people perceive and remember. When you realize that, you’ll understand that—from the spectator-centric perspective—there are unlimited “types” of magic tricks.

Dear Jerxy: The Multiple Bill Change

Dear Jerxy,

Did you ever do Hundy 500 or something similar? And if so, did you have a particular presentation you used? —SR

I don’t really use those bill changes to change $1s to $100s or something like that. At least not too often. I usually use that sort of technique in a trick like this, where I’m secretly switching some of the bills.

The trick of changing 1s to 100s doesn’t really need a presentation. In fact, an overblown presentation might detract from the trick because this is so clearly exactly what you’d do with magic powers. So any greater explanation probably weakens the effect.

I will tell you something I did once with Hundy 500 (or maybe Extreme Burn) ages ago.

I was watching The Food Network with my girlfriend at the time and they featured some little chili-dog stand in Pennsylvania on a show. It struck us as looking incredibly delicious. So we decided that the next day we’d take the 5-hour roundtrip and go get some chili dogs. Spontaneous road trips to satisfy one specific food craving are one of my favorite things in life.

On the way there I said I had to make two stops.

First, we stopped at a no-name gas station. I gave my girlfriend a $10 bill and asked her to go in and ask for a five and five ones. “I have change if you need some,” she told me.

“No,” I said, “I need the bills from this place.”

She was confused, but went in and got the money.

Next, we stopped at my friend’s place in New Jersey. “I’ll just be five minutes,” I said and rushed into the house.

A few minutes later I came out with a gallon jug of something that looked like pee.

“The fuck is that?” she asked.

“You’ll see later,” I told her and tossed the jug in the back seat.

The trip rolled on. We got our chili dogs, some tater tots, and some soft-serve ice cream. It was good as shit.

Then we headed back home.

At her place, I got out of the car and asked her for her help with something before we said goodbye.

I removed the five singles she had obtained for me from the gas station. I gave her one and asked her to take a look at it. “Looks normal, right?” I took it back and added it to the other bills in my hand.

I gave her the jug of yellow liquid and asked her to pour it over the bills in my hands.

She was wondering what the hell this was about, but if I wanted to get this pee liquid over my hands, she wasn’t going to stand in my way.

She poured the liquid over the bills, and as it glugged out of the bottle and splashed over the money, the bills visibly transformed from ones into 100s under this golden shower.

“Keep pouring,” I said, “they need to get fully saturated.”

After half the jug I said, “That’s probably enough.” I showed her the bills. All $100s. No ones to be seen.

“Thanks, babe,” I said. I shook the liquid off the bills. She stood there just blinking in confusion/awe. I asked her to cap the bottle. “I’ll save it. It might be good for another batch.”

That relationship was just a summer fling and we don’t really keep in touch much. But hopefully, she’s out there and occasionally thinks of that sunny road trip to the chili dog place, and how we had to get some one-dollar bills from a specific run-down gas station, and a jug of mysterious yellow liquid from a house in the middle of nowhere. And how that liquid just seemed to wash something away, causing the bills to change from 1s into $100s.

And how, the next night, after dinner at the nice sushi place, I gave her a wink and a “Shh” as I dropped two $100 bills on the table to take care of the check.

Influence: The Baader-Meinhof Reframe

I have a couple remaining influence posts to get to…

During last month’s “Influence Month,” I received an email from Michael Murray who has looked at the influence premise a lot in his work. He wrote:

I stumbled upon this train of thought that I really think you will love….

Note: I don’t have anything fleshed out but do believe this premise is right up your street.

There is a concept in psychology called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, also known as the frequency illusion, where once you purchase a new car you start seeing it everywhere. The idea is that there is an attentional 'awakening' to the object that now holds value to you.  So, imagine that now that the participant is thinking of their favorite movie and actor/actress they will literally start to see the name everywhere!!!!

I think you can guess the direction this is going in ;)

Anyway, a huge thanks once again for kick starting my thinking, I am hugely enjoying yours as always.

I think this is an excellent idea.

It’s sort of a “gentler” version of the Simulation Reframe I described last month. That concept was that every choice you make gets reflected in the world around you via the simulation “creating” the universe in response to your decisions.

If that’s a bit too “out there” for you (or for the person you’re performing for) then the Baader-Meinhof reframe might be a good alternative.

The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, as Michael described it, is when you buy a new car, or learn a new word, or familiarize yourself with an actor you didn’t know before and subsequently you start seeing that car everywhere, reading that word everywhere, or spotting that actor in a bunch of different stuff.

The reason being, of course, that you just weren’t focused on those things before and now you’re noticing them when, in the past, they just faded into the background.

Using Baader-Meinhof as an influence reframe, you can suggest that any choice we make is subject to this phenomenon.

Then you demonstrate it by having them choose a card, or movie, or location, or whatever your trick is.

And now, instead of saying, “And here are eight ways in which you were influenced to choose __________,” you will instead get to join your spectator in looking for the echoes of their choice in the world around you. And this is something that can go on all night.

Say, for example, I’m using Michael’s Show Reel trick. My friend chooses Tom Hanks. We look around and see the name Tom Hanks appears on the page itself in a couple of locations. Then we see a Tom Hanks movie is the only one slightly jutting out of my DVD collection. Later that evening, flipping around on the TV, we come across Castaway playing. Then I spot a note I was writing to my mom asking if she could sew up my torn handkerchiefs. “Look where I asked her to fix my torn hanks.”

(Is that a stretch? Sure. But you can choose to make the reveals as ludicrous or serious as you like.)

Then we get in my car and the radio starts blasting Chet Hanks’ (Tom’s son) hit, White Boy Summer. “Actually, that’s no coincidence,” I say. “I got this banger on repeat all day and all night.”

The fun thing about this reframe is that the trick wouldn’t end there. Going forward, my friend would be paying extra attention to when Tom Hanks pops up, and I’m sure it would end up feeling like it was happening more often than it was previously. Here the actual Baader-Meinhof effect kicks in and continues the experience for weeks, months, or years to come.

Thanks to Michael Murray for suggesting the idea. I think it’s a great influence reframe.