Up: Acting

Learning lines isn’t particularly fun, but it is necessary.

Tools

• Mochi (spaced repetition)
• LineLearner (I’m not a big fan)

Techniques

I use five techniques:

• Close reading of the text, out loud, slowly, paying attention to every single word. This is especially useful at the start of the process, but also useful once in a while to make sure you’ve not accidentally mis-memorized lines.

• Breathe in the text. Read a line, look away from the text, say the line out loud from short-term memory.

• Flash cards with spaced repetition. The front of the card will be the previous chunk of text, and the back will be the line that comes next. Go through it in order first, then shuffled.

• Say the full text backwards, chunk by chunk. No, not like Twin Peaks.

• Spaced repetition, backwards.

Also: learn the text in different settings (not just your bedroom), remove all characterization and interpretation from the text, so that the learned lines stand alone and you can plug them into different contexts and interpretations.