The BEST way to memorize your lines

How many times has a friend told you a story, you hear it one time, and then go off and repeat it to another friend who says, “No.” To which you reply, “Verbatim, that’s what he said.” And wasn’t it pretty much verbatim? You didn’t forget anything did you? You didn’t leave anything out. You even manage doing the accents of the colorful characters your friend described as well as re-creating the, “Gigolo with the limp.” In life, this happens every day. You hear stories, then go off and repeat them practically word for word. You do this all the time yet never question how you do it. It’s an ability everyone takes for granted.

Many times you have no idea how long the story will be. Sometimes they are short and sometimes they go on and on, yet there never seems to be the need to make any notes. How is it that we can so easily remember in such magnificent detail these long, involved stories that are told to us? And without making a conscious effort to, remember so much?

First of all, in life we don’t try to actively memorize a story as we are hearing it. While we certainly hear words when someone tells us a story, we don’t really see words. We see images. For instance, if I told you I was fishing off the end of a very old rickety dock that stretched out onto a beautiful glacier fed lake in Alaska, and just as I caught a huge fish, the dock gave way and I fell in; what are you seeing? You don’t really see words, you see images. You probably saw your idea of a rickety dock, the cold lake, and the surrounding mountains. In your mind’s eye, you would see this unfortunate episode play out, and it would be this scene as explained by me, which you essentially saw, that you would recollect and retell to someone.

Actors get so preoccupied trying to memorize all of the individual words in the scene, they frequently fail to understand the larger story the words support. This is why actors get lost and forget their lines. They haven’t fully understood the gist of the scene or story. They have made their primary concern memorizing all their words in the correct order without first fully understanding why the words fall where they do.

Most actors start memorizing by highlighting their lines and saying them out loud, trying to sound natural. This is exactly how you’re not going to start. First you’re going to detach yourself from the piece and just try to understand it as a scene you’re observing. Forget acting it. Do not concern yourself with how you’ll say the lines. Take each line and make quick and simple sense out of why you respond the way you do. You don’t have to write these thoughts down, just have a dialogue with yourself and come up with a logical through line.

Just like in real life, if I asked you the reason why you just said what you did, you would be able to give me a logical explanation, in short order. Don’t try to memorize any dialogue until you are comfortable with your overall understanding of the scene and the logic of your lines.

Next, have someone prompt you, and using your logical response through line, see if you can at least give the gist of the proper reply. Once you get to the point of being able to give an, “in the ballpark response” start accurately memorizing your lines. Make sense of your words, don’t worry about “acting” them. Know your lines so well that you can say them at any speed and in any way. Do not learn them at one tempo. I’ve asked actors in rehearsal to pick up the pace of the scene and they were so totally thrown, they lost their lines. This is because they had learned them at a particular pace and in a particular way.

The final test in making sure you know your lines, is to have someone call out random cues and see if you know the response. If you’ve created a logical through line of cues and response, this one should be an easy test to pass. Most actors never try this. The truth is, most actors only know their lines by rote and by the order they’re in. Which means they really don’t know them.