Designing Miracles

THE BLURB:
In Designing Miracles, Darwin Ortiz continues the task he
began in Strong Magic: to explore and raise the level of
craft in magic. This time he presents a groundbreaking study
of how laymen think and what it takes to amaze them.

Darwin has earned a reputation for creating some of the
strongest card effects in modern magic. In Designing
Miracles, he reveals for the first time the principles and
techniques that he follows in doing so. These insights will
help you choose stronger effects, create stronger effects,
and strengthen those effects that you've already performing.

If you've ever been puzzled by an audience's reaction or
lack of it, this book will dispel the mystery. It gives you
a new set of tools for understanding how magic works, why it
sometimes doesn't, and how to make it work better. Never
again will you be at a loss as to why an effect isn't
playing well. Never again will you be at a loss as to what
to do about it.

If your goal is to provide your audiences with an
unforgettable experience of impossibility, you'll find
Designing Miracles filled with insights to help you do so.
It will teach you how to use the audience's own thinking
patterns against them. It will show you how to turn puzzles
into miracles. It will do something that few magic books
can: change with way you think about magic.

Pages 200 - Hardcover

MY COMMENTS:
I got this book and was ready to put it on the bottom of a
stack of books to be read. A funny thing happened on the
way to doing that. I started reading the first few pages
and wound up devouring virtually the entire book. Like its
predecessor, Strong Magic, this book has some incredible
insight for anyone who performs mystery entertainment. And,
though it's geared towards magic and has many examples from
magic, much of it can apply to mentalism.

One topic he covered in the beginning, in a section entitled
"Whether it Fooled You," was the magicians' (and
mentalists') need to be fooled. I've actually written a
brief essay covering much of this same topic. The point is
that magicians have a file drawer of knowledge and
constantly want material that fools them. They forget that
laymen have very little to none magic or mentalism knowledge
and can be fooled by the most basic effects. (And they also
lose sight of the fact that they shouldn't be "fooling"
audiences, but "amazing" them, but that's a discussion for
another time.)

And although he's got some incredible and invaluable lessons
and advice for every mentalist (or mystery performer), I
will say there a few points I'll disagree with. A few pages
later than the last topic I pointed out, Darwin discusses
why ads list methods that a trick DOESN'T use and why that
appeals to buyers. He speculates that it's because these
buyers are looking for real magic. That's really stretching
it, though. Most buyers know it's not real magic, but
they're looking for a new method -- preferably self-working,
clever, and deceptive -- that is unfamiliar to them.
Unfortunately, they find that the actual method involves one
they already knew and wasn't listed in the blurb.

This is just a small sampling of the exciting topics that
Darwin discusses in this 200 page book. It's divided into
ten chapters: Picking the Best Method; The Magical
Experience; Causality; Temporal Distance; Spatial Distance;
Conceptual Distance; The False Frame of Reference; Visual
Magic; Correlation: Making and Breaking Patterns; and
Manipulating Memory. This is indeed a very important work
in discussing the design of performing, a subject that has
not really gotten the attention of a major work such as this
and a compelling subject that is quite essential to any
mystery performer. In other words, this is highly
recommended.