5 Tips for Memorizing Lines

Hi, my name is Mi-Young Kraft. I am a State Thespian Officer from Littleton, Colorado, and I’ve had to memorize a ton of scripts in my 11 years of acting. So, whether you’re preparing a monologue for an audition, or you’ve got the part and need to get off book, or even if you’re a techie just trying to remember your lines, here are five tips and tricks that have helped me memorize lines.

Tip 1: Make it Impossible to Avoid

So here’s a scenario. You have your script, you highlight it to make it look pretty, and then you leave it on your desk all day. When you get home, you study, you doom scroll, you make dinner, and it doesn’t really cross your mind to look at your script. On rehearsal days, you write your blocking notes in the margins, all neat and careful.

You put your script back on your desk when you get home, and again, it doesn’t cross your mind to look at your lines. Cut to off-book day and you’re calling line over and over again just praying that the stage manager in the void where you can’t see is holding up their script and following along. To avoid the endless line calling, the easiest way is to make your script impossible to avoid.

Bring your script with you to school every day, not just rehearsal days, and use little bits of downtime during the day to read over your lines. It’s better if you have a PDF copy of your script, but you might not have access to that. Look over your script when you need something to do before bed. If you’re not actively being used at rehearsal, go out into the hallway with a friend or just by yourself and run through your lines for the next scene or the scene you just blocked.

Tip 2: Practice, Practice, Practice

Even after you’ve spent hours upon hours upon hours staring at that black text on that white page, you might still find yourself blanking when you go on stage. And that’s because just reading your lines without actively engaging them can only go so far.

So, make sure to practice out loud and unashamed with someone else reading for the characters. If you don’t have a friend on hand to practice with, try recording your cue lines with spaces in between and then playing it back and responding to them with your lines.

Tip 3: Break Your Monologues Down

When I played Phoebe in As You Like It, I had two major Shakespearean monologues that initially sounded like a bunch of repetitive, boring, monotonous, Elizabethan mumbo jumbo. Yet I managed to memorize these within a few weeks by just breaking them down into key words. So, I took out a sticky note, and I wrote four to five key words from each of my monologues and then used that as sort of a cheat guide to practice my monologues.

This especially helps if your monologue is stylistically repetitive because it’ll show the different beats of the story, which ultimately is the most important part.

Tip 4: Make Flashcards

Especially if you have a lot to memorize and a lot of very similar cue lines, you can make yourself flashcards with the cue line on the front side and your line on the back side and practice these.

If you’re a well-known character, Quizlet might already have flashcards for you. So I would make sure to check, especially if you’re from a play or musical that’s produced all the time. For example, when my friend Oona was Agnes in She Kills Monsters, she was able to find one with every single one of her, like, 200 some lines on there.

Tip 5: Practice Your Character Work

This is actually a tip from my director. So, tying your blocking and your accent work into your lines when you memorize them at home really helps them to stick when you’re on stage during dress rehearsals and you have to do all three of those things at the same time.

You’ll also often find that blocking happens on story beats, and that way you can remember the story beats of your scene by tying them to when you move around in a scene.

And ultimately, we wanna make sure that all three of those things are solid for off-book days, for performances, and for auditions. So, it just helps to tie them all together and just practice them all as one.

Happy practicing, everyone.