The name Chris Mayhew might sound familiar to you.

But you’re mistaken. You are most likely thinking about Steve Mayhew. Which is a good thing, because that guy rocks!

Lots of people have asked me about the history of the Holes concept from my new booklet, A Clockwork Apple (available exclusively through this here Vanishing Inc. Magic). The concept has an interesting history, so I thought I’d share it here.

The idea actually pretty much started off as a joke about six or more years ago. Back then, I was going home every night trying to come up with some sort of trick that would fool the pants off of Tyler Wilson. I didn’t care what the trick was, or how ridiculous the method behind it was. Just as long as it would fool the pants off of Tyler.

Every night I would come up with something new, and every day he would stand there completely unimpressed. Then one night, I was playing around with the Holy POD plot and decided I wanted to do it in reverse. Instead of making a card vanishing from between two cards with holes in them, I decided I wanted a solid card to appear between two cards with holes in them. I came up with a ridiculous method, showed Tyler the trick, and waited for him to  once again stand there with a blank look on his face. Instead, he stood there with a shocked look on his face, and yelled out “What the hell did you just do!” I laughed, said “I finally got you!” Then I moved on. Tyler, however did not move on. What I thought, was a joke to get a rise out of a friend, he found to be nothing less than spectacular. We jammed out some ideas, and six years later, I now have a numerous amount of great routines utilizing the Holes Concept, two of which are published in A Clockwork Apple. You will find this and much more in the pages of the booklet, and hopefully you too, can come up with some great effects using the Holes Concept.

This story illustrates something important: if you love creating magic, then do just that: create. It doesn’t matter how dumb or ridiculous the magic you create can be (trust me, I have come up with some really bad stuff) the more you do it, the better you will get. And one day, maybe that piece of magic that you might think is stupid, may just turn out to be something more. Something that you can call magic.

Greetings guys. My name’s Oliver Meech and Andi asked me to make a guest post here on The Clog. He thought that this creativity idea would fit nicely in The Clog as it relates to his last post: Inspired by the News. So without further ado, here’s the idea:

OK, drumroll please. I’m about to let you in on a powerful creativity tool that can unleash a flood of new ideas. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you … Wikipedia. No wait, come back, I’ll explain.

A classic technique of creativity is random word stimulation. In other words, you look up a random word in the dictionary and try and apply it to whatever you’re thinking about. It sounds weird but it works because it breaks you out of logical thinking and forces you to make new associations, which leads to original thinking.

The trouble is, some words like “the” are less useful than nouns like “strike”. Here’s where three useful features of Wikipedia come in:

1. It’s packed with more words than any physical dictionary.
2. Most of the entries are nouns.
3. And last but not least, it has link in the top left corner called “Random Article.”

Voila – an endless supply of random words (and often images) to stimulate your thinking.

Here’s a quick example. Say I want to come up with a close-up trick. I’ve just gone on to Wikipedia now and clicked the ‘Random Article’ link. It’s given me a city in Brazil called Cassilândia. Apparrently it’s famous for its rodeo party. Rodeo makes me think of the board game Buckaroo, where you gently hang objects on a horse’s saddle whilst trying to prevent the horse from springing up.

So how about you show off your sleight-of-hand by switching an object that’s balanced on the horse’s saddle without it springing up. What object? Well, how about a coin that you ’switch’ using a shell and a Raven, or a card which you switch using a double lift. There, one click and we’ve already got two new routines.

Now it’s your turn: click here for a random article, have a think and let us know what you come up with.