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I have a list of places I need to get to within the course of a routine. There's A to E via B, C & D. Everything in between uses interaction with the participants & is ad libbed. I find this dynamic keeps it fresh for me & is better received by them. There's nothing worse than a magician rigidly sticking to a script that isn't working.

It reminds me of a traumatic experience at a Northern England working men's club decades ago. This should illustrate the danger of learning a script by rote and by this process finding it difficult to spontaneously getting out of trouble.

I read what I considered to be a wonderful routine with a thimble in the Gen magazine. It had rhyming patter and for some insane reason fell in love with it. I determined to try it out at my next show. Of course I had to learn the rhyme off by heart.

In those days I wasn't very bright. It hadn't occured to me that the last place on earth you should do a trick on stage with a thimble to rhyming patter was a Northern England working men's club full of miners, dockers and assorted people of that ilk. To make matters worse the club was of a cavernous size and I don't think 5% of the audience could see the bloody thimble anyway.

As soon as I opened my mouth and two lines into the rhyme I knew I had made an awful mistake. The looks of horror and the awful reaction haunts me to this day. The trouble was that once I started the bloody rhyme I was compelled to finish it unlike another trick where you can change tactics once you see things are not going to work out. I was trapped by this bloody poem.

Think about it. Some dumb magician reciting a rhyme on stage and doing a thimble trick that nobody could see anyway to an audience of miners and dockers.

Needless to say I never did the trick again.

So the moral of this awful tale is not to learn a script (particularly with rhyming patter) off by heart. You need the flexibility to change tactics in mid stream. You can't do this with a structured inflexible script.

Oddly enough I have just recently decided to resurrect the damn thimble trick again for old age homes and retirement centres since it won't matter if the routine is no good since half the audience is asleep anyway.

As I said, write a script, but be prepared to change it (ad lib). Having no script at all is rather fatal.....and sticking rigidly to a script may work for plays and operas, but isn't flexible enough for the "stand up" style that most magicians employ.
What you need is a bunch of lines and thoughts that you will constantly be able to go back to during the course of your presentation. The more you do this, the more you're able to improvise and work on the hoof.
Working informally can build your improvisational skills a lot. Whilst balloon twisting I constantly chat and improvise gags and silliness. I'm then working with no script, but know well how I'll be interacting and have specific directions I'll go in. And I have silly songs and poems I can recite at any time, masses of gags with balloons, when I feel the need for more structure - as well as loads of series of jokes that can get me out of those "dull" spots whenever neccessary.