Throwing Away Your Stock Lines with Ryan Kane

February 25th, 2021

creation, creativity, magic, performance, theory, virtual, writing

Jonah is joined by Ryan Kane, author of “Out of Stock: A Magician’s Guide to Writing Your Own Lines”, where they talk about the importance of writing your own lines when performing your magic and Ryan takes one of Jonah’s own lines and takes it through his process to replace it with something new or something better.

Original Content

Ryan Kane has exploded in the last twelve months, not only because he’s been doing a lot of virtual magic, but also because he’s been giving opportunities to a lot of magicians to perform by hosting open mic nights and helping to build up the community by helping magicians to work on their magic. Ryan does the deep work on magic, on writing your own lines, and if you see him perform you know that he’s written every single word.

The Prevalence of Stock Lines

Ryan is passionate about challenging the use of stock lines in performances. They’re functional and easy to get used to always using but, as Ryan points out, they can cheapen the entire performance if someone in your audience has heard that line somewhere else. Ryan has developed a system to help break down the use of your stock lines, examine what use they’re actually serving, and work towards creating newer and better lines that not only will be original lines that you’ve created for yourself but might also bring out aspects of your show that have grown stale over time.

Endless Chain

David Gerard. He’s a fantastic mentalist magician from the Bay Area and when it comes to a magical thinker he’s among the top.

What do you like about modern magic? What do you not like?

I like being able to connect with a lot of magicians that I normally don’t.

I don’t like that this is a boy’s club and we need to get up to the time with and we need to stop making excuses for ourselves and become more inclusive.

Take home point

Set a new standard for yourself. Figure out that you’re not going to do this anymore, I’m gonna get rid of stock lines, I’m gonna do more stage time, I’m gonna be better about watching tape… these are easy little things that will make a massive change in your show and in your life.

Plugs

The Mostly Magicians Virtual Open Mic is completely free and you can request to join the public Facebook link by visiting facebook.com/groups/mostlymagiciansvirtualopenmic

Out of Stock: A Magician’s Guide to Writing Your Own Lines is available now on Amazon

And you can find out more about Ryan Kane at ryankanemagic.com