Will Houstoun: Magicians don’t think imitation is sincerest form of flattery..
Will Houstoun is a writer, editor, magician and consultant. He has a PhD in Victorian conjuring and is the current literary fellow at the Academy of Magic Arts, Los Angeles.
If there is one thing I have learned in more than a decade working as a conjurer, it is that coming up with a good magic trick is really hard. The process fundamentally involves doing two things. First, you create the effect, what the audience will see. Obviously this must be something impossible, but that is just the starting point. Impossibility should be taken for granted, the thing you create must do something more. Having chosen an interesting impossibility, you must then work out how to make it happen in a way that is undetectable to an audience. Even after doing both of these things you will still have little to show for your effort, beyond a few scribbles in a notebook. It takes a huge amount more time and effort to produce something that is ready for performance.
And that’s just for one trick…. Read more