Memorizing Your Lines

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I’ve been recently struggling with memorizing lines. I have seen actors who can sit down in the makeup chair with the sides, go over their text, and get it perfect when they get on set. I want to be able to do that. Right now, my memorizing techniques are quite labored: I write out the text longhand and learn it line by line in a monotone, moving backwards and forwards through the handwritten lines. Its a very thorough system, but it’s not great if the lines change when you go for your line-up rehearsal (the rehearsal with actors on a film set before the camera and lighting gets set up… unfortunately, sometimes the only rehearsal you get on a film).

Memorization happens fastest when there is more information than just the words that can be stored. The more things you connect to the words, the more pathways your mind has of getting to them faster. This is often why actors have an easier time memorizing lines once they are in blocking rehearsals. The words have been associated with a particular piece of stage business or a location in the physical space.

But in an audition situation, or when you’re walking on a film set for your day in front of the camera, I tend to miss words or replace words with my own variations. Not a great habit. So I’m on a quest for how to memorize lines quickly and word perfect that doesn’t require me to go through a stage rehearsal process. This is what I’ve found:

  1. Chunking. This is a process whereby you break down a line into distinct sets of words, or chunks. Memorizing chunks of words, instead of individual words, lets you memorize much more in the same amount of time.
  2. Physicalization. This is creating a physical movement, or the intention of a movement to go with every word in your text. If your text is “murder” and you pair that with stabbing someone with a knife, it will be much harder for you to say “terrorism” (this happened to me recently in an audition in the line “The man is wanted in the US for _________”). Physicalization also has the added benefit of bringing your acting into your body, instead of just being in your head.
  3. Singing. Create a tune to go with your lines. This allows you to associate musical notes with certain words and could help you remember which particular word is coming next. Be careful with this one, though as you don’t want to lock yourself in to a particular way of saying the word.
  4. Handwriting. This is the technique that I usually use: write out your lines by hand. Pay attention to the writing of it, say the words to yourself as you’re writing. Again, this creates a parallel pathway to the particular words and doesn’t require you to lock yourself into a particular way of saying them. I generally write out the words without punctuation so when I read it I don’t get learn where the lines are supposed to start and stop.
  5. Mental Mapping. This is a technique whereby you create a room in your mind. The more vivid and detailed the room is (include as many senses as possible: colors, smells, textures, tastes, etc), the more attachments it will have to the things you put in it. Create a dresser or something where you’re going to store your lines. Then you place your lines in order within your room. Going through the places where you store your lines, you will be able to visualize what the lines are. I haven’t tried this technique and am not sure how applicable it is to line learning, but it feels like a good technique and I’m excited to try it.
  6. Strange Connections. Similar to the Mental Map, strange connections makes use of your imagination to create strong connections between the words. Take the words of the text and come up with strange and improbable animals or things in weird clothes doing the things or creating a visual picture of the words. The stranger the better: we remember out of the ordinary things more easily than mundane things.

Further reading:

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