The Eight Step Process to Building a Repertoire

I’m currently in the process of rebuilding my repertoire with the Carefree Philosophy in mind.

Building a repertoire is a simple process. So simple that it probably doesn’t require a post walking you through it. I’m writing this post because it’s so simple. I hear from people who are overwhelmed by the process, and I think they’re making it needlessly complex.

I’m going to walk you through the steps of building a repertoire, and the one unique step to my process which is super helpful to me and I think could be useful to you as well.

Steps to Building a Repertoire

1. Find tricks you like in books, magazines, downloads, online lectures, etc.

2. Once you’ve found a trick you like, learn how to do it.

3. Ask yourself this question: “I like this trick… but would I like performing this trick?” Does it have a move you’re uncomfortable with? Or use a gimmick or methodology you don’t like? If so, forget it. This is part of the Carefree philosophy. There are 10s of thousands of tricks out there. If you don’t completely enjoy performing a trick, don’t bother with it. Be brutal. Craft a repertoire of tricks you love with methods you enjoy performing.

4. You found a trick you like. You learned it. And you’ve decided you would enjoy performing it. Now what? Now you grab a sheet of paper, or a notebook, or open a document on your computer. Write, “Repertoire” at the top. Now write down the name of the trick. This is the easiest step, but the one people are least likely to do. You can’t skip this step. It’s mandatory. Your repertoire doesn’t exist in your head. It exists on this sheet of paper (or in this notebook or computer document).

5. All you need to write down is the name of the trick. But if you want, you can write down additional information like the creator of the trick, where it can be learned, the “category” of trick it is, etc. If that doesn’t sound interesting, you don’t have to do it. Carefree.

6. Write down where the trick lives. [I’ll explain this below.]

7. Repeat steps 1-6 for more tricks.

8. Once in a while (every couple of weeks to every couple of months), read through your repertoire. Practice the tricks that should be practiced. (Many of them won’t need to be practiced, you can just think through them.) Delete the ones you no longer feel like having in your repertoire. As you read through the list, consider where, and in what context, you might perform the trick. Write that down if you want.

That’s it. You now have a repertoire.

Step Six

This is the “unique” step I mentioned above. I think it’s very important for any repertoire, but especially for me as I build my Carefree repertoire.

You need to identify where each effect lives.

That is: Where the effect is stored so that it can be deployed when the time is right.

The answer to that question of where an effect lives should not be “under my bed in a shoebox” or “in a trunk in my closet.” If that’s the case, the trick will rarely, if ever, be performed.

Impromptu card magic effects “live” in the deck. That’s easy.

You might have an effect with a key that lives on your keychain.

I have a bunch of effects that live in a Wonder Room display.

The point is, I don’t just have a list of effects that make up my repertoire. I have a list of effects that “live” somewhere, ready to be used. This is so important if you want to be someone who performs regularly.

(Next week, I’ll continue this concept by breaking down different “houses” you can consider for your effects to live in.)

But there you have it. That’s how to build a repertoire. I recommend 100 tricks, because it’s challenging but doable. You can do more or less. But I think 100 is a good average. I wouldn’t have a 20-trick repertoire (as an amateur), because I think it wouldn’t be stimulating for me and I’d feel constrained. But I also wouldn’t do a 250 trick repertoire because I feel like it would take too much upkeep. I want a good-sized repertoire in service of being able to perform frequently. Not just a big repertoire for the sake of one.

Softness

I’m always excited when I see earlier examples of a concept I came to on my own. It makes me feel like I’m on the right path.

Here is Andy Nyman, in the instructions for his trick The Moment, discussing one of the basic tenets of the Carefree Magic philosophy.

Your audience—consciously or subconsciously—will key into what you are focusing on when you perform.

If you’re thinking about the moves you need to do, they’ll be looking out for moves.

If you’re worried about them getting a look at some prop or gimmick, they will want to look at that prop or gimmick.

If you’re focused on using the exact right words, they will be wondering why you sound awkward.

Conversely, if your focus is on the interaction and this interesting thing in front of you, that’s where they will focus.

That’s why everything needs to be well within your abilities. The only points you’ll get for doing knuckle-busting sleight is with the losers at some magic convention. There’s nothing noble about spending 200 hours learning a difficult sleight. And even once you think you’ve mastered it, you still probably look weird doing it. You look tense and overly-focused at a moment you’re supposedly not doing anything. The truth is, I’ve seen almost no magicians in my life who can smoothly do truly difficult magic. I don’t think it’s a worthwhile goal, because I don’t think it’s achievable. And even if it is, I don’t think it adds that much to the spectator’s experience beyond what you can accomplish with methodologies that are well within your reach.

Seek softness. Seek casualness. Seek a carefree, laid-back style of interaction. This will fool people more than any center-deal ever did.

Mailbag #122

Re: Last week’s Cross-Cut Tweak Tweak

My tweak on the cross-cut force.  The participant is asked to hold the deck and is instructed as follows:  ‘I’m going to snap my fingers (or count to three), and when I do I want you to grab a bunch of cards—any amount—and put them on the table.  And I want you to do this without thinking.  No thinking,ust grab a bunch and put them on the table.”  The participant complies.  “Great, now put the rest on top crosswise.”  I mime the replacement, just to be clear. “We’ll get back to that.”

I think the “no thinking” instructions adds a layer of deceptiveness in that includes the cross-cut packet as something that also needs no thinking.  The context in which I use this is as a revelation of a card previously forced in a different manner.  Your thoughts?—AK

I see what you’re going for, but here’s where my thinking differs…

In general, I’m a big fan of slowing down forces. When I do an under-the-spread cull force, I really drag out the proceedings. I want it to be clear to them that they can touch any card, we can go back in the spread if we need to, they can change their mind, etc. etc.

The cross-cut force, however, works on a different principle than most magic. There’s no secret action. It’s just the human mind’s inability to follow along with what packet is where.

“Inability” is the wrong word. It’s not that the human mind can’t follow what’s going on with the cross-cut force. It’s that it doesn’t bother to pay attention until a point where it’s too late.

If you said to someone, “I’m going to have you cut to a card, and then we’ll look at the card you cut to, and that will be your selection,” and then you tried to do the cross-cut force, it would be much more likely to fail because they’d be ahead of where it was going.

So I believe you want to do the cutting part of the cross-cut force with as little focus on the action as possible.

The way I do it is: “Cut the deck anywhere… okay, we’ll get back to that.”

Because the cross-cut force only works to the extent their minds aren’t paying attention to the process, I don’t want to do anything that might cause them to pay more attention. That’s why I don’t tell them to replace the other packet “at a weird angle.” And why I, personally, wouldn’t snap my fingers or count to three or use your language of asking them to cut “without thinking.” I feel like any of those things would just get the spectator to engage their mind more than just asking them to “cut the cards” and moving on.

Later on, once the card is in play, then I might focus on the cutting action and the fairness of it. “You shuffled the deck, and you cut the cards anywhere you wanted. Just one card shallower or one card deeper would have brought us to a different card.” Blah, blah, blah.

This is just my philosophy. I think the cross-cut force is fooling enough that it can stand up to almost anything that you might say while doing it.

But my goal is to give myself the absolute best chance of fooling people with the force and I feel like I wring a final few percentage points of fooling out of the force by making the cutting action as forgettable as possible. And that also means six months down the line, if I use the cross-cut force again with them, they don’t recollect anything unusual I said or did as being part of a similar process to something they did before.

It’s just a cut. I treat it like a cut. A simple, forgettable cut.

If I want to do a force with more focus on that part of the procedure, I’ll likely use a different force altogether.

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 I’ve been closing with your version of The Blur in one of my table-hopping sets for over two years (using a custom blank deck I had made) and it’s my strongest card trick. Now that the trick is available in Bicycle Maiden backs, you don’t have to petition Tenyo to make you a copy. I’d give it a shot if you never followed up on it. —FE

Here is The Blur by Mathieu Bich and Garrett Thomas…

I enjoy tricks like this visually, but I also know the people I perform for well enough that they’d just ask to see the deck. At that point, what is my option? Blow my “Asian mist” in their face like I’m the Great Muta and run the other direction?

So I wanted a way for the trick to end examinable, and I had the idea to combine it with Dean Dill’s Blizzard.

So they would select a card, and you would “hypnotize” them or do whatever your premise was so that they could now “only see the card you chose.” They would tell you they actually could see all the cards, but they were blurry now.

You would say you want to try again, break the hypnosis (deck is back to normal), have them choose another card, do the Blizzard switch, and “re-hypnotize them” in some more “intense” manner. Now when they look at the deck they see no faces except for the card they chose.

So the “blurring” effect is a mistake, or at least a precursor to the faces vanishing entirely.

And I would pretend that it’s only in their mind that this is happening and that I could still clearly see the faces.

Their chosen card wouldn’t be examinable at the end (unless you forced it), but since that’s the only card that nothing apparently happens to, I think there would be little to no heat on that card. It would all be on the now-blank deck.

Dustings #115

If you ordered the hardcover reprint of the Amateur at the Kitchen Table essay, you received an email this morning telling you how to confirm your shipping address so I can mail it out to you. That email went to the email address associated with your Paypal account.

I can’t ship you the book until you confirm your address.

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Speaking of books, this week, I received my third email in the past year from someone saying one of their Jerx books was stolen from their car. Clearly the value of the Jerx supporter reward books has gotten out to the gangs of smash and grab car thieves and they’re now targeting the vehicles of my supporters so they can resell the books for massive profits.

No, I’m kidding, I’m sure those books are now sitting at the bottom of a dumpster somewhere. This is just a reminder to keep your magic books—or at least your magic books from me—out of your car. I feel bad when I hear these stories, but there’s nothing I can do as I have literally no extra copies of any of the books I’ve put out.

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A bunch of people have sent me this and asked me my thoughts on it, given that the idea is similar to a trick I came up with years ago…

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My thoughts on it are…

1. It’s probably not legit.

2. If it is legit, it will probably cost a fortune.

3. If it is legit and doesn’t cost a fortune, then it will be so well known to be virtually useless for magic purposes. Sadly.

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After I made my post on reviving cigarette magic, a bunch of people wrote in to suggest that we focus on reimagining these cigarette tricks as weed tricks—especially given the much more lax regulations against marijuana these days.

It makes sense, I think I probably know more people that smoke weed than smoke cigarettes.

There’s just one problem with this idea though…. weed is corny.

I’m not saying you are corny if you smoke weed. Just that—for whatever reason—weed itself has a sort of “dopey” connotation to it. It’s not a cool look.

Smoking cigarettes is strange. It can be seen as sort of trashy. But there is also a weird elegance to it that allows it to come off as romantic or sexy for some people. It can be seen as “stylish.”

Unfortunately, smoking weed is never really stylish.

Wait…

I spoke too soon…

Mailbag: Declining Performing

I like performing stuff, but it’s usually when I feel like it. There are contexts where for whatever reason it feels off. And I usually decline. I have noticed a few things and situations that make this happen:

- if there are other people around (not part of the group) and my friends ask specifically for some card tricks. I think I feel self-conscious of the magiciany look of pulling a deck of cards out and people seeing. Or even... getting outside people seeing us and asking for more tricks. There is something about doing more than 1 or 2 tricks one after the other that feels weird to me.

- if there is the potential of other outside people asking for more tricks. It’s not the performing for a stranger that bothers me at all. I’m fine with that. It’s the, i just did 1 or 2 tricks so now a 3rd or 4th is like too much. As if 1 or 2 things is normal and over that is already magiciany and performing monkey or whatever you want to call that. I don’t actually enjoy that feeling.

[…]

- Even though i love doing card tricks. It’s like there are moments where it’s just weird to do card tricks even if people ask. Specially standing up. If there are tables around that I can use, card tricks feel normal. But actually holding a deck in hand and performing standing up for example, that way is part of that magiciany look. Again. I love card tricks. And performing them. It’s just some contexts that make it feel weird to me. Like a full group standing up and I’m part of the group

[…]

Do you actually have times when you decline performing? Or have heard this situation for other magicians?

I have no clue exactly what the "magiciany look" is that bothers me. But it’s there enough to notice it.—JFC

It sounds like you’re carrying around a deck of cards with you. If you do that, and if you show people card tricks, then you are going to be known as the guy who goes around and shows people card tricks. So yeah, you can’t be surprised if people are asking for more and more.

It’s like you’re walking around with a bag of potato chips. Someone is going to take one, then another, then another. Why? Because they’re fucking potato chips, that’s why you do with them.

But imagine you took that person over to a table and had a waiter bring out a single slice of potato, blanched to achieve an optimal texture before being gently submerged in a bath of premium, high-smoke-point oil; then crisped to a golden hue before being dusted with artisanal sea salt—and then you had them eat it, slowly, piece by piece, savoring each bite. They’re still eating a potato chip, and they might crave more, but they’re not going to say, “I’ll take 50 more of these.”

This is the difference between presenting something like it’s meant to be scarfed down, and presenting something like it’s meant to be savored.

Most magicians treat card tricks like they’re Peanut M&Ms, meant to be consumed by the handful.

That’s fine if you want to do a lot of card tricks for people.

But if not, then it’s up to you to reframe the nature of the interaction.

For me, that means not coming off as someone who has a bunch of card tricks memorized. Sure, I occasionally have one that I’m working on. But—as far as they know—I don’t have a library of card tricks in my head ready to go at all time. I never perform that way, so they don’t expect it from me.

A strong premise also helps for this sort of thing. If they think of what they’re seeing as simply a “card trick,” then they might expect you to have a bunch more to show them.

But if I say, “Hey, can you help me practice this gambling move I’m working on? I’ve got a poker game I’m going to next Friday, and they actually encourage cheating—so long as you don’t get caught.” Then it makes less sense to ask to see another one when it’s over, because the context of the interaction wasn’t just: “Watch me do a card trick.”

If people already know you as the “card trick guy,” it may be hard or impossible to change that. But you can always just tell people you haven’t really been keeping up with the card tricks so much recently. “Oh, I do have one that I’ve been working on.” This preps them for the idea that you don’t have an endless stream of tricks to come, so they should really focus on this one.

But the “magiciany” look you’re worried about seems primarily driven by pulling out a deck of cards and showing multiple card tricks. If you don’t like that look (and I don’t blame you if you don’t), then you should challenge yourself to leave the deck at home and build your repertoire of stuff that can be done with everyday objects or nothing at all.

A Cross-Cut Tweak Tweak

For the first time in a long time, I got called out on the Cross Cut Force a couple of months ago. And then 10 days later, it happened again.

Now, normally if someone were to question the Cross Cut Force—if they were to say, “Wait, that’s the bottom card, not the card from the middle”—I would just play stupid.

“Huh? Wait… what are you saying? Oh…I see… yeah, it doesn’t really matter, but go ahead and look at whatever card you want.” And then I’d change course and go into a different trick.

This is one of the good things about the Cross Cut Force. If they are ever to question if they’re really looking at the card they cut to, you can just act like you lost track yourself, and then go forward with something else.

But I couldn’t really do that this time, for reasons I’ll discuss.

The thing which got me busted was a tweak from Benjamin Earl that I’ve endorsed in the past. And that is the idea of telling them to cut the deck, and then put the remaining cards on top “at a weird angle.”

This gets the deck in the position you want with very few words on your part. The bottom half is on top of the top half, without them being lined up.

But there’s a problem with this phrase, as I learned in my two recent failures.

Failure #1

“I know how you did that,” my friend Justin said. “You’ve used that before. The ‘weird angle’ thing. The card I looked at was actually the bottom card.”

At this point it was kind of too late to play dumb because he had called out the specific language I’d used that allows for the deception.

Failure #2

In Toronto, back in June, I was performing a trick for someone, and he paused me when I picked up the pack and told him to look at the card he cut to.

“That’s not the card I cut to,” he said.

At this point, because it was a testing situation, I didn’t want to try and cover for it. So instead, I asked him how he knew. Had he studied magic before? (Which is something we sometimes get.)

And he said, “No. But when you told me to put it on top in a weird way, or whatever you said, it just struck me as odd.”

What I think he was saying is that it caused him to pay more attention to that moment, and so he noticed the discrepancy later on.

These are the issues with telling someone to put it on top at a weird angle:

First, it’s a semi-memorable phrase. If they’re someone who sees you perform every now and again, and you use the Cross Cut Force frequently, it can cause suspicion if they hear it more than once.

Second, it’s a phrase that draws attention to itself. It requires interpretation and judgment. “Put it on top at a ‘weird’ angle? What does that mean? Is this ‘weird’ enough? Am I doing this right?” Perhaps those thoughts are only subconscious but still, I don’t think that’s the point of the trick where you want people doing any thinking.

So I’m not using that language anymore.

I haven’t settled on exactly what I’m going to say, but I’ve been using one of the following.

1. If they cut the deck from the table or from my hands, I take the remaining packet and set it on top myself.

2. I tell them to “turn that packet and set it on top” and I mime the action.

3. I tell them to place that packet on top “crossways.”

In any case, I immediately follow that up by saying, “And we’ll get back to that.”

This is, I think, the key phrase. I want the spectator to think: I’ve cut the deck into two packets. We didn’t coalesce the deck because we’re going to get back to it at some point later. In the world of magic, that’s fairly logical.

Again, I’m not suggesting this is some “huge flaw.” Out of the other three people who were helping out with testing in June, only one mentioned having an issue with the “weird angle” language in the past. But that being said, I just don’t see a reason to ask them to engage their mind in that moment for any reason.

Ben Earl has quite a few great subtleties for the Cross Cut Force in his work that I use often. But this is one tweak, that I will be re-tweaking. Or de-tweaking. Or un-tweaking. Or whatever the word should be.

On Pacing

Letterman’s youtube channel recently posted Penn and Teller’s first appearance on the show.

I’m so glad I grew up in the era that I did. With so little magic to consume on TV, every appearance became something to record and obsess over. Penn and Teller on Letterman or on their PBS special, Copperfield’s annual CBS shows, up through Blaine who was kind of the last vestige of that era of excitement.

It was really a lesson in pacing. And I try to remember it when I’m performing. If you show someone something just a few times a year, I don’t think they will ever get tired of magic.

But start showing that person something every few days and they will soon grow weary of it. Sure, the worse you are as a performer, the quicker they will be over your shit. But no matter how good you are, I don’t think it’s possible to genuinely amaze and enchant someone 100 times a year. I don’t know if you can even do it 20 times a year.

My new rule that I’m (mostly) sticking to is this:

If someone is really blown away or really affected by a trick I show them, I wait at least two months before showing them something else.

That means they will see, at most, six really strong moments of magic a year. And even that might be too much. I might switch to waiting three or four months in between.

I’m good enough that I can show someone 20 tricks a year that all have a distinct feeling to them. In fact, I could probably show someone 100 tricks a year and have each one be different and memorable in some way.

My concern isn’t that they will be come accustomed to the tricks themselves.

My concern is that they will become accustomed to the feeling of astonishment.

Theoretically, I could control that by constantly doing more and more impossible magic for them.

But in reality, I think the only way to prevent that is to regulate how much you perform for them.

Wonder, awe, enchantment, astonishment, and mystery—these emotions are most powerful when experienced sparingly. To preserve their impact, I think you must carefully control the pace at which you evoke them.

Let 80s TV be your guide here. Give people time to miss seeing you perform and build anticipation for what you’ll show them next. If you want to perform more often, broaden your social circle and spread out your performances. Don’t heap the performances on one person or group to the point that the magical becomes commonplace.