Learning Your Lines: The Compact Guide

By Mark Channon

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Release date: Apr 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9781788503754

Mark Channon

Mark Channon was born in Aberdeen, leaving in 1987 to train as an actor at Arts Educational Schools, London. Over the next fifteen years he worked in the West End, on national tours, throughout the UK, at the National Theatre and on television. In 1995, Mark became one of the world’s first Grand Masters of Memory at the World Memory Championships, and successfully pitched a game show to the BBC called Monkhouse’s Memory Masters, that influenced his next twenty-five years. Since then, he has continued to work as a trainer and coach in Memory and High Performance, attracting a range of clients from CEOs, presenters and students, to doctors, lawyers and actors. In 2019, he appeared as the on-air Memory Coach for Channel 4’s Can I Improve My Memory? Throughout his various careers in coaching, product leadership and consulting, acting has always remained a passion. Over recent years, Mark has worked with hundreds of actors in workshops on the act of learning lines, honing the strategies introduced in this book. Mark’s other books on memory improvement include Improve Your Memory and The Memory Workbook, published by Hodder. Mark lives with his wife Zoë, whom he met in a production of Singin’ in the Rain in 1999, and his three boys Zachery, Elijah and Noah.