How to Memorize Your Lines

Memorizing your lines for a play, an acting class, for film, television or whatever, is not as hard as you think.  There are many different ways to memorize your lines but we’ll show you the easiest way.  The most important thing you need to understand when it comes to memorizing your lines is one word: repetition.  See? Simple, right? So, lesson number one in learning to memorize your lines is REPETITION.  And what is repetition?  Simply doing something over and over and over again.

One popular way you can do this is by standing in a mirror an “acting out” all the parts in the scene.

Step 1.  Pretend you are the other characters, not just your own.  Read everything on the page, including the character descriptions.  The key is to make sure you read all the lines out loud. Seeing your expressions in the mirror as you act out and say the words gives you a good idea of how other will see you when you perform.  You don’t have to use a mirror.  It may seem tiresome to do this but your brain is learning and storing what you’re saying.  That’s it.  Then you just read the scenes over and over again until you feel you don’t even need to read it any more.  Until you have it in your memory.

When you feel comfortable, have a family member or friend test you.  Give them the script and see if you can remember ONLY YOUR PARTS now.  Have them play the other characters in the scene.  Then, voila!  You will see that you know the scene(s) so well that you can say your line without holding the script and looking at it. Whether you’re doing a good job acting with that scene is another story so stick around this site and you’ll be the best in no time!

If you still don’t have your lines memorized, just repeat step one.  It may take you more time than others to memorize your lines but hey, you’re an actor, right?  Get to work!

If you have questions about this post, just leave a comment below with your question below and we’ll answer you back!