This is especially important for writers of any variety but especially for copywriters. As soon as the reader can feel you setting her up or manipulating her emotions, she’ll shut down, tune out, or click away. You have to create an emotional effect without letting the audience see behind the curtain.

For fiction writers, this involves set-ups and pay-offs, and effectively planting the set-ups invariably requires a bit of narrative misdirection if the writer is to avoid “tipping his hand.” Much of this also applies to copywriting, too.

And as with Magic, getting it right requires practice and a focus on technique. No magician ever thought his performance would improve with “inspiration.” Magicians practice technique till it’s effortless because making it look easy is part of the magic. Hoping that it will all come together without any hard work isn’t magic, but magical thinking.

- Jeff

@Cynthia – throughout this post, I’m referring to “magic” as many stage or professional magicians think of it: as a form of performance to simulate the use of mysterious forces to do seemingly impossible things. I would include illusions within this as well.

I realize that there are plenty of people who think of magic as literally being mysterious forces that allow us to do seemingly impossible things. Magic is sometimes used as a catch all category to explain what appears to be unexplainable. That wasn’t the focus of my article – it was more of a distillation of the thoughts of several professional magicians.

I think your views of magic and the creative process are probably different that my own, Cynthia, but you’re certainly entitled to those views that you’ve obviously spent a lot of time formulating.

Thanks for the comment!

With that point of view, I think of creativity as part hard work, part surrender to the process. The ‘process’ involves the unexpected, the spontaneous, the surreal, even.

Some of the common questions about creativity that allude to this mystical or magical process:

Where do ideas come from?

How do we know when a work is finished?

How can we explain that feeling when we know a brush stroke or an alignment of words or a line break in a poem is just exactly the right thing?

How do we explain those ideas that come in the liminal state when we’re about to fall asleep? (I find my brain writing entire stories without my own efforts!)

How do we choose our right medium?

How can we explain a visceral response to a piece of art, music or writing?

Aside from all the hard work and focus, where does talent come from?

Certainly there’s a certain practice and ‘tricks’ that go into making a work of art. We’re always asking a reader or viewer to suspend their disbelief, to join us in a world we’ve created, just as magicians ask when they step onto a stage and begin to entrance the audience.

But I like to think of the creative process as something more sublime and mysterious than that. Even after all the years I’ve spent clarifying what it takes to get the creative work done, I still believe it’s a deeply magical and mystical process.

Brilliant post, Master magicians were always the ones who worked a lot of experiments out to get the jaw-dropping outcome. This needs time and a lot of sacrifices to be made but the result is astonishing as well.
As presented beautifully by you, the preparation part is one of the most important aspects of creating a masterpiece.
Magicians are truly the role-models for creative professionals.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts.