PERSPECTIVES
The Magician and
the Technical Writer

My father has spent his career making sure people don't know how he does things. I've spent most of mine making sure they do.

He's a magician. I'm a technical writer. I make complicated things simple; he makes simple things seem impossible.

So naturally, I've edited his books on sleight-of-hand magic.

His first book presented an interesting challenge: how do you teach someone to perform an action the audience must never notice? And how do you explain not just what the magician is doing, but what everyone watching is supposed to think is happening?

A magic-show audience knows there's an explanation for what they're seeing, but they enjoy not knowing what it is. They want to be astonished, entertained, and perhaps just a little unsettled. Someone reading an instructional manual or knowledge base wants the opposite: they've come with questions, and they expect to leave with answers. A magician can delight an audience by concealing a crucial detail but if I leave out something equally important, I've failed the reader.

Our book had to accommodate both expectations. We needed to document the secrets of a performance while teaching someone how to keep them, using nothing more than words, photographs, and arrows. No video, no animation, and no magician standing beside the reader to demonstrate what we'd meant.

Documenting reality and illusion

Sleight-of-hand instructions present an unusual problem: you're documenting two versions of the same event, both the reality and the illusion.

The performer needs to know exactly where the coin is, how to hold it, and what each finger is doing. But that's only half the instruction. The performer also needs to understand what the audience is supposed to see, which movements should appear natural, and which actions must go completely unnoticed.

Then there's timing. Some movements happen in sequence, while others happen simultaneously. A written explanation has to distinguish between them without making the reader feel as though they need three hands and an advanced degree in choreography.

My father had written preliminary instructions, but getting them into publishable form required more than checking his grammar. I watched him perform each move, slowly and repeatedly, comparing what he actually did with what he'd written. Sometimes the instructions omitted details that were second nature to him but essential to someone learning the technique.

I photographed the hand positions, edited the grayscale images, and added directional arrows and diagrams to show how a coin should roll, how a wrist should turn, or how fingers needed to move. The photographs weren't decoration; they were part of the instructions. Every image had to communicate something useful, and every arrow needed to make clear exactly what was moving and where.

The book separated the performer's actions from the audience's perceptions and progressed from individual moves to combinations of moves, then complete tricks. Readers were developing a set of skills they could combine into increasingly complex performances.

The challenge wasn't simply to reveal how a trick worked. It was to explain the details an experienced magician might no longer consciously notice.

The trouble with thumbs

Of course, before someone can master a complicated sequence of movements, they need to understand where to put their fingers.

In one manuscript, we encountered a problem involving a coin and a thumb. The trick required the performer to pinch a coin between the thumb and index finger, concealing it from the audience's view. The placement mattered: get it wrong, and the audience would see the coin. We needed a term that identified the precise location, particularly because other sleights relied on the same positioning.

We considered "webbing," but that wasn't specific enough. There's webbing between all the fingers, and the instructions needed to distinguish this particular location from the others.

My father suggested "the crotch of the thumb."

He was absolutely serious. His reasoning was that the thumb and index finger were like two legs, and the space between them was therefore, quite obviously, a crotch. I disagreed. He explained the anatomy again. I remained unconvinced.

We went back and forth over this far longer than any reasonable person should have to spend discussing the anatomy of a thumb. I eventually proposed "the crook of the thumb," borrowing from the familiar expression "the crook of the elbow." It was specific, understandable, and didn't require the reader to imagine a tiny pair of pants. We could include an illustration to eliminate any remaining ambiguity.

He was not easily persuaded, but "crook" finally made it into the manuscript. I considered it a significant editorial victory.

More than twenty-five years later, I maintain that I made the right decision, although I have to concede that his terminology was considerably more memorable and entertaining.

Every movement tells the same story

A convincing illusion depends on more than concealing the mechanics. Every visible movement has to support what the audience believes is happening.

Consider a magician apparently placing a coin into his left hand while secretly retaining it in his right. The right hand makes the placing motion, the left hand closes around the imaginary coin, and the right arm drops naturally to the performer's side. The magician's attention shifts to the left hand, and the audience follows.

It's partly sleight of hand and partly pantomime, with every movement reinforcing the expectation that the coin is exactly where it appears to be. But let the right hand linger awkwardly in the air, or let the left hand behave as though it isn't holding anything, and someone may start wondering why. The illusion depends on the consistency of the entire performance, not just the success of the concealed move.

Technical documentation has a similar obligation, although the intended result is considerably less deceptive. A heading should accurately describe the information beneath it. A screenshot should show what the reader can expect to encounter. And if an illustration contains an arrow, that arrow had better point to something worth looking at.

Every inconsistency introduces doubt. The spectator starts looking for the concealed move. The reader starts questioning whether the instructions can be trusted. Once someone begins looking for mistakes instead of following the experience you've created, you've lost something difficult to recover.

Learning the trick is only the beginning

There's another reason sleight-of-hand instructions have to be so precise: eventually, the magician needs to stop thinking about them.

A performer has to practice the movements until they're practically automatic, because there's a great deal more happening during a magic trick than the manipulation of a coin or a deck of cards.

A good magician is also telling a story, making jokes, watching the audience, responding to unexpected reactions, and occasionally dealing with someone determined to announce how the trick is done. None of that works particularly well if the performer is concentrating on what their left thumb is supposed to do next.

I've watched magicians who have mastered that distinction, and I've watched people who haven't. The latter may execute an impressive trick, but watching someone concentrate very hard on doing something difficult isn't necessarily entertaining.

And there's the matter of misdirection. A larger arm movement can conceal a smaller movement of the fingers. A casual flick of the wrist can hide a card slipping behind the hand. These actions have to appear effortless and natural, even when the performer is doing something quite deliberate. It's difficult to direct an audience's attention convincingly while you're still struggling to remember the mechanics of the trick.

Once those mechanics become second nature, the performer can concentrate on the audience rather than the movements. That's what our instructions were ultimately intended to make possible: students who understood each technique well enough to stop thinking about it and start performing.

Making the impossible look easy

I'd been editing and proofreading since high school, so when my father asked me to work on his book, I figured I was taking on another editing project, just with a rather unusual subject. Instead, I found myself studying hand movements, filling in explanations that made perfect sense to an experienced magician but not necessarily to anyone else, and figuring out how to teach something I was still learning myself. I didn't know it at the time, but I'd stumbled into technical writing and instructional design.

What took me even longer to appreciate was how much my father's work and mine had in common. We paid attention to different details, but both of us needed to understand what an audience would notice, assume, and expect to happen next.

The students reading our book occupied an especially interesting position. They needed to understand every concealed movement and practice it until it became second nature, all so they could create a convincing illusion for someone who would never know those movements had happened.

The better we explained the magic, the better our readers could make it disappear.