Five Tips To Be A Better Magician

1) Practice, more practice and even more practice

It`s dull and obvious, but painfully true. To perform great magic, you need to be able to perform everything you do upside down, inside out and back to front. Performing in your sleep is probably a bit too far, but you get the idea. When you perform some sleight of hand or misdirection, it should be muscle memory that handles the movements so your brain can focus on your audience.

For the patter you use, this should also be second nature, but not recited as if memorised off a card. It should be engaging and related to your audience at hand, and that will only come naturally to you if you know the material well enough to "jazz" a little.

Where possible, you should practice deliberately, which is very different to just "running through the moves". This means painstakingly analysing every move and every word you say to see if they are working as a whole, do they fit together, where are things falling apart at the seams.

2) Repetition, more repetition and even more repetition

Yes, I realise the similarity to the previous tip, and that is relatively on purpose. But I mean repetition in all areas. Repetition in your practice, repetition in your rehearsals (which are very different to practices) and repetition in your performances.

Repetition is the only way to gain firsthand experience of what does and doesn`t work. This is how you`ll know if your effects and routines are well suited to one another.

3) Perform to strangers

Terrifying I know, but you can`t practice only on family members, you need to get the firsthand experience of walking up to people you don`t know and showing them magic. You`ll need to work on your "approach anxiety", and the best way to do this is to walk up to strangers and offer to show them some magic. There are hundreds of ways to best handle this, but a simple starter is to perform at parties and show people you don`t know. It is a neutral environment where everyone is on your side. You can build up confidence there and then move on to walking up to people on the street.

4) Create some routines

Routines are a series of effects that roll on one after the other. Using a routine means that rather than just performing a magic effect and then performing another, and another you end up with a "routine" as each effect naturally leads on to the next one. This will give your performances a sort of "flow" making for a more seamless performance.

This will also force you to analyse your effects and put them in an order that makes some logical sense, to both you and your audience. You`ll have to find patter that works continuously throughout your performance. You don`t want to be doing some card effects claiming to be a card shark, and then some rope effects claiming to be magic. The lack of continuity will confuse your spectators, just not in a desirable manner.

5) Create a character

I usually recommend doing this last and then going back over the work you`ve already done and looking at it all with a fresh eye. Creating a character is also a lengthy process, and you need to understand yourself first. What sort of magic do you like, and why? What kind of performance style do you like?

When it comes to creating a character, it is one of the most time consuming and important things we can do as a magician and while there are far too many steps to go into here with any decent detail, it is definitely worth you giving it some attention.

I haven`t gone into as much detail as I might like in this short article, but I wanted to quickly cover some of the most critical areas that will affect your performances, aside from the magic itself of course. I also wanted to show you that while the magic itself is essential, you are an entertainer and a performer first. I can help with all of these areas and more, so don`t hesitate to get in touch.