Learning Your Lines: The Compact Guide

Mark Channon

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781788503754
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Acting & Auditioning

This accessible, systematic guide will teach you how to memorise your lines quickly and effectively, and let go of the fear of forgetting them – helping you build confidence and focus, and reducing anxiety and stress around auditions, rehearsal and performance.

Inside, you'll find dozens of tips, tricks and techniques such as Memory Palaces, Mental Maps, Creative Memorisation, Visual Cues and many more, along with exercises and examples to illustrate how they work in practice. Discover how to harness these tools to strengthen your memory, and develop a personalised line-learning strategy that works for you and your acting process – one that is easier, faster and more enjoyable.

The Compact Guides are pocket-sized introductions for actors and theatremakers, each tackling a key topic in a clear and comprehensive way. Written by industry professionals with extensive hands-on experience of their subject, they provide you with maximum information in minimum time.

1. Strategise: Your Superhuman Memory

How Good is Your Memory?

Like most people, your memory will be good in some respects, and not so good in others. Think about it this way: if you were to score your memory between one to ten, how good would you say it is, where ten is the best possible version and one is the memory of a goldfish?

When I ask this question to a room of a hundred people, around twenty per cent believe they have poor memories (ranking themselves 1–3), seventy per cent believe they are average (4–7), and only a small percentage, usually around ten per cent, believe they have excellent memories (8–10).

How good we believe our memory to be can have an impact on how we approach a situation. Let’s say you have an audition tomorrow and you believe you have a poor memory; this will make you believe perhaps that you ‘can’t do it’, or that your ‘memory isn’t good enough to learn lines quickly’. You may even have past experiences to back both of these statements up. However, when you approach any type of memorisation or learning with this type of belief, it’s going to increase your levels of anxiety and impact on your performance.

The truth is we all have fantastic memories but we tend to focus on the moments where it didn’t work so well: the name you didn’t remember; the fact that slipped your mind; the location of your keys. But these are only a few of the jobs our memory performs, and like any set of challenges, they can be overcome with the right strategy; indeed, if you were to think about all the memories you have stored throughout your entire life, you would start to realise that your memory is, in fact, phenomenal.

The Right Mindset

In this chapter, we are going to plant some seeds to help you learn simple and effective strategies that support the belief that your memory is fantastic. It will offer you a practical toolbox to improve your memory going forward and create positive experiences around your opinions on memory. With a stronger belief in your memory, you will feel more relaxed and in control; you will ask better questions, be more curious and raise your levels of interest – because when you are interested in something, it is much more straightforward to remember details about it. Trusting your memory is a catalyst for rapid learning in any field.

As you read through this chapter, you may well be asking yourself: ‘How do I put these techniques into practice whilst learning lines?’ That is a fantastic question to ask, and it’s something which will become clearer as you progress through the book. In the meantime, play along with all the activities and, as questions come up, make a note of them, perhaps guessing the answer for yourself. As you get further into the book, you’ll find more practical ways to apply these techniques for learning lines. You can also make use of an online community as you read: www.markchannon.com/learninglines

Creative Memorisation

Creative Memorisation is a recipe for learning I have developed, which was born out of two-thousand-year-old techniques in the art of memory. Creative Memorisation builds on these techniques by bringing together four key ingredients to up your game when it comes to remembering, understanding and connecting to information on a physical and emotional level.

Flow

Flow is crucial for line-learning; it is the ability to become completely present, in a state where you are reactive, not thinking about what just happened or what is to come. As an actor you may have experienced this feeling many times. You have performed a scene, it felt like it went exceptionally well; however, you have no idea how you did it, and you’re unsure you can recreate it. In this state of flow, there is no anxiety, stress or tension, and you have higher levels of focus.

Later in the book, we will look at simple activities you can practise to get yourself into this state of flow consistently.

Imagination

Think of imagination as your ability to bring things to life in your mind through all of your senses. As an actor, it’s probably something you already practise; however, it’s less likely that you make the most of it when learning lines. As we dive into this model and try some practical activities, you’re going to have to take your imagination to a whole new level, which will benefit your overall creativity.

Association

Association is the ability to make connections, to figure out how things fit together and see the big picture, making use of your brain’s natural associative capabilities. Think about what you had for breakfast. What does it spark off in your mind? Perhaps it’s a conversation you had at the same time, a discussion which reminds you of something you said you would do later, and so on. We are wired with this ability to make connections; once you learn how to take control of this process and combine it with your imagination, not only will you remember faster, what you memorise will stick in your mind for longer.

Meaning

Meaning is key to processing what you learn from your short- to your long-term memory. In creative memorisation, we’ll think about meaning from two different aspects, intellectually and emotionally:

• Intellectual meaning – Understanding what you learn intellectually can give you a greater sense of confidence. From an actor’s point of view this could mean understanding what has been said, and what has not been said, the intention that lives
• Emotional meaning – Understanding what you’ve learned emotionally helps to move it from your head into your body. This is the stuff that lives deep, the emotional journey of the dialogue and hidden feelings that bubble up to the surface. When you combine what things mean intellectually with the driving force of emotion, it’s not that things become easy to remember but rather that they become hard to forget.

One thing I’ve noticed working with actors over the years is that Creative Memorisation doesn’t just build the skill of learning lines more effectively, it also gives you a greater sense of freedom with a script. You no longer live with a ‘fear’ of forgetting, and you experience significant benefits in levels of confidence.

The following set of strategies will be the building blocks to developing this skill. I use the word ‘skill’ deliberately; like any new skill it will require effort and compelling reasons to learn it but, with commitment, anyone can acquire it.

The Chain Method

The Chain Method taps into our amazing visual memories; more than this, it also utilises our love for stories. Stories are easy to remember and hard to forget!

One of my observations over the past twenty-five years is that it is generally easier to remember the story and details of a fictional book than details of a non-fiction book, which might contain complex frameworks, terminology and facts.

When reading a story, you are usually employing all of the ingredients in Creative Memorisation: you are in a state of flow whilst bringing the world to life with your imagination, making connections between characters and plots and, most importantly, making sense of things whilst being emotionally invested as if it were you at the centre of the story.

One of the differences between fiction and fact is that, with the first, you do not try to remember, it just happens through your heightened observation as you find yourself becoming part of the experience. With non-fiction, however, you tend to be much more focused on remembering, which ends up being counterintuitive. Stories that we experience can become unforgettable.

Try this activity and see how the Chain Method works using the power of your visual memory and stories.

In a moment, you will read a story that includes fifteen main words. Each of these words is connected together w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1. Strategise: Your Superhuman Memory
• 2. Prepare: Increase Your Levels of Focus, Reduce Mind-wandering and Get into the Zone
• 3. Prime: Raise Your Interest
• 4. Connect: Learn Without Tension, Stress and Anxiety
• 5. Embed: Remember Lines Faster and for Longer
• 6. Rehearse: Move Lines from Your Head into Your Body
• 7. Perform: Create Confidence in Any Situation
• Conclusion: The Way Forward
• References
• Acknowledgements
• Index of Strategies and Techniques
• About the Author
• Copyright Information