This is my first essay, and I’m not much of a writer an I’m working on my essay writing structure so place bare with me. BTW, I don’t know if this has been done before but here is my essay.

What makes a "good" Magician?

I’m going to sound like adjones for this, but I’m going to attempt to answer a question you might ask yourself at times. “What makes you a ‘good’ magician?” or maybe “AM I a ‘good’ magician?” And hopefully at the end of this essay, you will ask this question to yourself.

Before we get to the question, let’s talk a little about what “good” means. The dictionary definition of good, is to be satisfactory in quality, quantity, or degree. Of course, we can apply this to our magic. After reading this, you might think to yourself, yes, I am good in magic. I have tons of tricks and I perform… I am good.. The real answer is no.

Why do I say, you’re not? It’s because collecting, accumulating, owning and having tricks does not make you “good.” It actually makes you worse, in my opinion. Why? In Jay Sankey’s book, Beyond Secrets, he talks about someone who owns thousands of tricks, but chooses not to use them. It’s not the quantity of the tricks, it’s the quality of the tricks.

“Okay…you’ve talked about not owning too many tricks…what now?” Now, I’m going to be talking about presentation. Presentation is a big word, in my opinion. It has a big role in everything you might do. Particularly, in magic. My definition of presentation is, the act of performing. I know it’s simple, but it’s not easy. I’ll tell you why.

The first step to becoming a “good” magician, is to have a trick. Even if you have one trick, presentation is still very important. Then comes presentation. Presentation is going to bring life and excitement and wonder to your audience. The best way to build presentation is to build patter. You need to connect with the audience and come close to them. Presentation is essential to a magician, especially a “good” one.

Also, another thing I want to cover is a good magician knows how to handle their props, the audience and their presentation. Those are important to know.

Now, I want to mention something we all hate. And that is messing up. But messing up isn’t a terribly bad thing, is it? No, in my opinion, I think it helps you or me, as a magician, better and more experienced, if you will. Making mistakes in a performance will make you stronger as a performer. All you have to do is patch up those spots and you’ll be better than the last performance.

I remember one time, a long time ago, I was performing sponge balls to my dad. I’ve been practicing the sponge ball routine for a few hours, and I tried to perform it to my dad. My dad was at an awkward angle for me, and saw a flash of my retention vanish. I knew he saw it, so I stopped and practiced and established a way that it would be impossible for someone to see it. Then I did the same routine again and he didn’t see anything. He was amazed. I’m glad to have had that moment on my dad, rather than a real audience member. Which brings me to another important necessity of magic.

Practice. Practice is as big of a word as presentation. You’ve probably read some magic books, that tell you to “practice, practice, practice” millions of times. But it’s true. I once read a book that told me to “Practice 25 times in the mirror, and if you mess up, start over.” I thought that was a little strict at first, but I got in a habit of doing that, and I’d say it works. Before your show, rehearse and practice in front of a mirror, maybe perhaps film yourself with a camera/camcorder so you can look back and see yourself make those particular errors or mistakes. I find, either method extremely useful and efficient.

This concludes, my essay on what makes a “good” magician. Hopefully you find yourself asking yourself, “Am I a ‘good’ magician?” or better yet, trying out these methods how to be a “good” magician.

Thanks for reading and have a great day!

*Please comment and tell me how to make my essays better!

The part about performing an effect 25 times in front of a mirror/camera and restarting at 1 every time you mess up that effect, does that really work?

Yes. But I'm sure you don't really have to do it 25 times, but the idea is so that you can perform it under any condition. Perform it, so you have no problems with it. Know it like the back of your hand. That's the idea. How's my essay?

Alright, thanks.

I don't know much about essays but I thought it was pretty good.

Well in the beginning some people (including me when I was starting) tend to keep going when they mess up during practice. They just do that move over again till they get it once and kind of just forget about the fact that they didn't actually master it. Which makes you think like you've practiced the effect all the way through plenty of times and you should be good at it and ready to perform for an audience. But when you go to perform for an audience you end up messing up. That's because when you were practicing you didn't actually master that move, you just did it once or twice more till you got it that one time.
You've probably heard the quote that goes something like "an amateur magician practices until they get it right, A proffessional practices until they can't get it wrong".
Well this is exactly what that pertains to. If you do it till you get it right once, chances are there was some luck involved and you can't actually do it consistently. If you practice till you can't get it wrong then you know you'll get it right during your performance.
So the correction for this problem that I have found (and that I use) is to practice the individual moves until you are very confident with them and then practice the whole routine over and over. Once you are confident with the flow of the routine see if you can get at least five times through as if you were doing it for a live audience. NO pauses, NO redos, NO quiet mumbling to yourself while trying to think of the next line of patter, etc. Once you can do that and are at complete ease doing that you are ready to audience test it.

Exactly, acebrawler. well said.

That, as I've said before, is the difference between practicing and rehearsing.

"Practice" involves, for the most part, perfecting sleights, techniques, flourishes, etc., both alone and in sequence. When you are practicing, you are primarily concerned with mechanics. Rehearsing involves combining the sleights, techniques, etc. with patter and other aspects of presentation into a seamless routine. Practice the moves until you can do them well...then practice them more until you can do them without thinking about them; that's the point at which you can begin to rehearse, since you can now overlay patter onto the moves and focus on aspects of presentation rather than on getting the moves right.

If you find yourself stumbling on a particular technique or tensing up because you have to shift your mental focus to the technique, then you have to move back into practice mode and spend more time on that technique. When presentation and technique are fused seamlessly and you can perform the routine (not just "do the trick"), without stops, stutters, stumbles, or interruptions, you are approaching performance readiness.

Lots of young magicians practice; not enough rehearse.

Unless you are working with an out-of-the-box presentation script, there is a middle phase between practice and rehearsal that involves development of a performance script. Most guys here don't have a clue where to start in that regard, yet it's in that phase of the process that you will discover the "real secrets" of entertaining with magic. IMHO, that's also what makes a truly "good magician."

I agree one hundred percent caffinator.