Rule 7: Chekhov's Wand
In 1911 Nevil Maskelyne and David Devant, two of the premier magicians of the day, published Our Magic. In the first section, The Art in Magic, Maskelyne outlines 20 rules for magic performance. After well over 100 years, are these rules still relevant, and do they apply to more than magic.
Rule 7: Let nothing occur without an apparently substantial cause, and let every potential cause produce some apparently-consequent effect.
This was the first rule I struggled to see an obvious application outside of magical performance. That was until I looked a bit deeper.
With the first part of this rule we come to a very storytelling-specific idea. Motivation. With a magic effect, this kind of thing is extremely important. As a magician the only question we want our audience members asking at the moment magic happens is how? If, on the other hand, effects are occurring for no clear reason, they will also be asking why? This lessons the ‘how’, which lessens the impact.
While this ties into a storytelling narrative - and for the magician also touches on ‘motivation’ of action - its use to a public speaker might be less obvious. At first glance, for these people, this appears to be a slightly modified version of rule 5. Don’t go off topic, don’t meander. Don’t give out information that makes no sense. But it’s more than that. This is about providing evidence to back your argument. This is about appealing to reason and logic over sheer emotion.
During his Penguin Magic lecture, David Williamson speaks about a classic of magic, the Cups and Balls. At one point he drops into a very funny impression of Dai Vernon talking to Charlie Miller about one of the balls. “It’s gotta wiggle.” Williamson was illustrating the need for a ‘convincer’. Tiny points that an audience member might not even be consciously aware of, but that make the whole effect seem perfect. In this case, if a ball has apparently dropped through a cup, it should be moving ever so slightly when it lands. This is the second part of this rule: that the logic of the narrative needs to be carried through. There are times magicians will ignore this rule; you rarely see blood and guts flying across the room when an assistant is cut in half which would appear to be the ‘apparently-consequent effect’ of this action. However, by and large you don’t want to snap people out of the illusion you’ve created by using incongruous effects. When applying this to talking or lecturing, I would argue that this is demonstrating the need for showing what caused something to happen. This is all about providing the evidence. Oddly, what seems like an obvious point when giving a talk or lecture, can be quite complex for magicians. This is because while, when giving a talk ‘proof’ is an obvious thing, in the world of magic it’s often far more subtle.
This is because although when giving a talk ‘proof’ is an obvious thing - in the world of magic it often needs to be far more subtle.
To demonstrate this, they included the following poetry extract:
““And that little more, and how much it is...
And that little less, and what worlds away.””
I wanted to include this because honestly, how many magicians these days will comfortably quote an extract from a 53 verse poem published 55 years before? This demonstrates something vital to all great art: Look outside your sphere for inspiration and breadth. But that is a subject for another day.
TFT
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