The number one question that I get asked about acting is: How do you remember all those lines?

Memorization seems to be a fading skill for most people.

Why commit things to memory when you can look them up online?

Of course, when you’re performing in a play, you don’t have that luxury. You’ve got to get those lines memorized.

I’ve been interested in memory for decades. I even bought one of those memory courses by Kevin Trudeau that he used to sell on TV. Thirty years ago!

For the last few years, I’ve used the following process to memorize lines.

First, I go through the script and break down the scenes or acts into smaller chunks or beats.

Second, I try to summarize my line with an image. Which means trying to find a word from the sentence to function as the image.

This is the tricky part because not all words or sentences translate easily into images. And these kind of images or representations are usually personal. An image that works for me, might not work for you.

For example, for the line “Got us from the grave!” I would picture a grave. For the line “Robert, it was a hard time for everyone, we all loved Tara.” I would picture an old-time convict wearing striped uniform with a ball and chain around his ankle. Doing hard time.

The stranger or more unusual the image, the easier it is to remember.

I first came across this concept in the book Moonwalking With Einstein by Josh Foer.

So, I would come up with an image for every sentence or line of mine in the section.

The third thing to do is to associate those images together in a story. The purpose of the story is to help you remember the images in the right order.

Then I try to picture the image and then say the line.

Once I’ve got the image and lines memorized, it’s easy to match them up to the other person’s lines. So, I know WHEN I’m supposed to speak, as well as WHAT I’m supposed to speak.

It sounds a bit more complicated than it is.

It’s one of those things that get faster once you do the groundwork. Like coming up with some images that represent words or ideas for you.

I find it a much faster way to learn lines than repeating them over and over until they “stick”.