When it comes to monologue, breaking up the speech into smaller chunks makes the learning process much easier. No matter how long a monologue is, there are usually turning points where one thought shifts to another, a character realizes a new need, tries a fresh tactic or decides to be honest. These are known as beats and they’re very useful when you’re trying to learn a monologue because your voice should be able to vary in pitch and rhythm.
Here’s a quick and simple tip that can really help when starting out. You’ll need your monologue printed off and some pencil to do this. Read through the monologue to familiarize yourself with it. Next, run your eye through the text and mark where the thought turns (use a forward-slash). Only mark one or two turns for one thought, don’t mark every single comma or breath or emotional word, these aren’t beats. A character is performing an action when they say their dialogue and a beat is when that action changes. A character might be trying to be honest with someone, maybe they start to be evasive or they stop being evasive, they may start to persuade, maybe they start begging or they become demanding.
Use the easiest verbs possible for your beat labels, there is no need to have lengthy analysis on each beat. Think of what a character might be doing when they are talking such as trying to: persuade, warn, tease, confess, avoid, challenge, reassure, seduce, beg, flatter, argue, convince etc. If they are trying to make the person listening to them see something, you might call it ‘trying to convince them’. If they are trying to get them to back off you might use ‘defend’. This will allow you to play a beat in a specific way so you don’t end up going from a beat where you are trying to calm a person down straight into where you are trying to get them out of your life without taking a beat out in your head!
Sometimes beginners will put so many beats in a monologue because they see every sentence as a different action/beat! This is when they end up chopping up the whole monologue and it becomes frantic. If you have a short monologue, maybe try finding between two-four big turns in the text and see what shifts between one and another, do they start off more calm and finish with more anger? Do they become more emotional, more vulnerable, more confident? If they have a more dramatic shift, that is likely a better spot to label than a smaller turn.
Now, after you have done this, read out each section (beat) and try to find its individual pace or focus. At each beat turn, take a moment to breathe and then start the following beat by changing something about your focus, for example, your voice, a look, a stillness or something more intense. Your changes can be subtle and don’t necessarily mean that you need to do anything big or dramatic to mark the beat. In fact, sometimes a quieter line or a more sustained eye-contact or a breath can mark the beat shift.
There’s no need to have the notebook full of lots of notes either, just write down a couple of beat labels and an objective you could aim for, perhaps some physical check like “hands still” or “shoulders relaxed” and see if this improves the flow of your monologue. It’s just about having enough guidelines to help you have some choices or shifts in your speech to make it more dynamic and more interesting.