Denis Defreyne

Learning lines

Up: Acting

Learning lines (going off-book) isn’t particularly fun, but it is necessary.

Constraints

Learn only the words. Do not learn emotions, actions, responses, line readings, or blocking. This is crucial to be able to respond/react believably to your scene partner.

Don’t rush to being off-book. There’s always a chance of mis-memorising lines, and slowing down decreases that risk.

Techniques

I use a handful of techniques that I combine.

Before I do anything else, I read the text, slowly and carefully. I mark any words or expressions that I don’t understand, and look them up. The purpose of this first stage is to understand the text as best as I can.

Next:

  1. 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 I’ve not accidentally mis-memorised lines.

  2. Read the text out loud, saying every line 5 to 10 times.

  3. Record the text and play it back.

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

  5. Write down the text using only the initial of every word, so that “back then, we lived in a cottage” becomes “BT, WLIAC.” Occasionally, I use something akin to musical slurs to indicate connected chunks of words. Using these initials, attempt to reproduce the entire text.

Midway through, I also start doing this:

  1. Flash cards with spaced repetition. The front of the card will be the cue (the previous chunk of text or the previous action), and the back will be the line that follows.

  2. Write down the text in a way that makes more structural sense. Add line breaks, indent lines, as if it’s poetry. Some lines might just have one or two words after this, and that is fine.

  3. Figure out the beats/units. This isn’t feasible earlier on because I need to have some understanding of the story.

  4. Write the text down by heart. Indicate any phrases that I struggle with.

  5. Explicitly highlight which words are cues; which words trigger specific responses. For example:

    A: [snip] Am I being too optimistic?
    B (me): I’m not too worried.

    This is especially useful across unit transitions, where the connection between lines can sometimes feel nonexistent.

  6. Say the entire text with no pauses, going as fast as I can.1 Indicate any phrases that I struggle with or don’t come out immediately.

This is also when I start focusing on specific phrases or units that I struggle with. I’ll focus on those to take out all the knots.

Near the end:

  1. Say the text in reverse, chunk by chunk.2

  2. Use backwards spaced repetition.

When do I do it?

  • in the morning
  • during bathroom breaks
  • while commuting
  • before going to sleep

I keep using all these techniques throughout the entire process. To ensure that I’m as flexible with the text as I can be:

  • learn the text in different settings (not just the bedroom)
  • remove all characterisation and interpretation from the text

Tools

  1. Obviously while still taking the time to breathe. ↩︎

  2. No, not like Twin Peaks. ↩︎

Note last edited September 2026.
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