Fuller is a consummate professional of the stage, having refi ned his techniques for learning roles over many years. He is often cast in a leading role; at other times, he may play several lesser characters in a play while also understudying the lead. How does he do it?
When he starts with a new script, Fuller puts it into a binder, goes through it, and highlights all of his lines. “I fi gure out how much I’ve got to learn. I try to estimate how much I can learn in a day, and then I try to start early enough to get that learned.”3 Highlighting his lines also makes them easy to fi nd and gives him a sense of the construction, so this use of highlighting is rather different from what students do in class when they highlight merely for purposes of rereading. “You get the shape of the line, and how the back- and-forth works.”
Fuller uses retrieval practice in various forms. First, he takes a blank sheet of paper and covers a page of the script. He draws it down, silently rendering the lines of the characters he’s playing opposite, because those lines cue his own, and the emotion in them is refl ected one way or another by his own character. He keeps his own line covered and attempts to speak it aloud from memory. He checks his accuracy. If he gets the line wrong, he covers it up and speaks it again. When he has spoken it correctly, he reveals the next passage and goes on.
“Half of knowing your part is not just what to say, but knowing when to say it. I don’t have an exceptional brain for memorizing, but one of the keys I’ve found is, I need to try my
Make It Stick ê 219
best to say the line without looking at it. I need to have that struggle in order to make myself remember it.
“I’ll work like crazy. When I get to where it feels like diminishing returns, I’ll quit. Then I’ll come back the next day, and I won’t remember it. That’s where a lot of my friends will panic. I just have faith now that it’s in there, it’s going to come back a little bit better the next time. Then I’ll work on a new chunk, until I get to the end of the play.”
As he progresses through the script, he’s constantly moving from familiar pages and scenes into newer material, the play taking shape like threads added to a growing tapestry, each scene given meaning by those that came before and extending the story in turn. When he reaches the end, he practices in reverse order, moving from the less familiar last scene to practice the more familiar one that precedes it and then continuing on through the last scene again. Then he goes to the part preceding both of those scenes and practices through to the end. His practice continues reaching back in this way until he has come to the beginning of the play. This working backward and forward helps him stitch less familiar material to more familiar, deepening his mastery of the role as a whole.
Learning lines is visual ( just as they are laid out in the script), but, he says, it’s also “an act of the body, an act of the muscles, so I’m trying to say the lines in character, get how it feels. ” Fuller examines the language of the script, the textures of the words, and the fi gures of speech for how they reveal meaning. He works to discover the way the character carries himself, the way he moves across the stage, his facial expressions— all facets that reveal the underlying emotions that drive each scene. These forms of elaboration help him develop an emotional approach to the role and a deeper connection to the character.
Make It Stick ê 220
He also notches up his retrieval practice. In place of the written script, he now speaks every line of the other actors in the play into a palm- sized digital recorder, voiced “in character” as best he can discern it. He tucks the recorder in his hand. His thumb knows where to fi nd the controls. The thumb presses “play,” and Fuller hears the characters’ lines, then his cue; the thumb hits “pause,” and he speaks his line from memory. If in doubt about his accuracy, he checks the script, replays the passage if need be, speaks his lines, and then goes on with the scene.
When he’s understudying a role, before the director and cast have worked out the blocking (how the players move in relation to one another and the set), Fuller practices at home, imagining his living room as the stage and the way the blocking might be laid out. There, as he goes through scenes with his recorder, hearing others’ lines and speaking his own, he is moving through the imagined scene, adding physicality to the part, reacting to imaginary props. When the actor he’s understudying is in rehearsal, Fuller observes from behind the the-ater seats at the back of the hall, walking through the blocking himself as the actors rehearse on stage. He continues to practice later at home, adapting the imaginary stage within his living room to the now- established blocking.
Fuller’s learning pro cess is a seamless blend of desirable diffi culties: retrieval practice, spacing, interleaving, generation (of his character’s soul, carriage, motivations, and idiosyncra-sies), and elaboration. Through these techniques, he learns the role and the many levels of meaning that make a per for mance come alive to himself and to his audience.
Generation
In 2013, John McPhee published a piece in the New Yorker about writer’s block. Age eighty- two at the time, McPhee of-
Make It Stick ê 221
fered his remarks from the vantage of a high perch, atop an illustrious career that has earned him many awards and acknow ledg ment as a pioneer of the craft of creative nonfi ction.
Writer’s block is the seemingly insurmountable barrier one must somehow clamber over if he is to have any hope of engaging his subject. Writing, like any art form, is an iterative pro cess of creation and discovery. Many would- be writers fail to fi nd their voices for the simple fact that, until they are clear about what they want to say, they cannot bring themselves to dive in. McPhee’s solution to this problem? He writes a letter to his mother. He tells her how miserable he feels, what hopes he’d had for the subject about which he wants to write (a bear), but that he has no idea how to go about it and, really, it seems that he’s not cut out to be a writer after all. He would like to put across the sheer size of the bear, and how utterly lazy it is, preferring to sleep fi fteen hours a day, and so on.
“And then you go back and delete the ‘Dear Mother’ and all the whimpering and whining, and just keep the bear.”
McPhee’s fi rst draft is an “awful blurting.” “Then you put the thing aside. You get in the car and drive home. On the way, your mind is still knitting at the words. You think of a better way to say something, a good phrase to correct a certain problem. Without the drafted version— if it did not exist—
you obviously would not be thinking of ways to improve it.
In short, you may actually be writing only two or three hours a day, but your mind, in one way or another, is working on it twenty- four hours a day— yes, while you sleep— but only if some sort of draft or earlier version exists. Until it exists, writing has not really begun.”4
This is the crux: Learning works the same way as McPhee’s
“awful blurting.” Your grasp of unfamiliar material often starts out feeling clumsy and approximate. But once you engage the mind in trying to make sense of something new, the mind begins to “knit” at the problem on its own. You don’t engage the
Make It Stick ê 222
mind by reading a text over and over again or by passively watching PowerPoint slides. You engage it by making the effort to explain the material yourself, in your own words—
connecting the facts, making it vivid, relating it to what you already know. Learning, like writing, is an act of engagement.
Struggling with the puzzle stirs your creative juices, sets the mind to looking for parallels and meta phors from elsewhere in your experience, knowledge that can be transferred and applied here. It makes you hungry for the solution. And the solution, when you arrive at it, becomes more deeply embedded with your prior knowledge and abilities than anything pasted onto the surface of your brain by PowerPoint.
So take a page from McPhee: when you want to master something new, delete the whimpering and go wrestle the bear.
Refl ection
In Chapter 2 we tell how the Mayo Clinic neurosurgeon Mike Ebersold uses the habit of refl ection to improve his skills in the operating room. Refl ection involves retrieval (What did I do? How did it work?) and generation (How could I do it better next time?), invoking imagery and mental rehearsal as well (What if I take a smaller bite with the needle?). It was this habit of refl ection that brought him to devise a surgical solution for the repair of a delicate sinus structure in the back of the skull that cannot be tied off because the structure is somewhat fl at and tears when you snug the suture.
Vince Dooley, Georgia Bulldogs football coach (Chapter 3), helped his players use refl ection and mental rehearsal to learn their playbooks and their adjustments for next Saturday’s game. The Minneapolis cop David Garman (Chapter 5) uses refl ection to improve his undercover strategies. The power of refl ection as a learning technique is apparent throughout the
Make It Stick ê 223
personal memoir Highest Duty, by Captain Chesley Sullenberger. “Sully” is the pi lot who successfully and miraculously ditched US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River in 2009. Time and again, in reading his autobiography, we see how he refi ned his understanding of fl ight and the control of his aircraft through training, personal experience, and the close observation of others. The pro
cess started from his earliest
days at the stick of a single- engine crop duster, continued to his jet fi ghter days, his time investigating commercial airline disasters, and his granular analysis of the few available examples of the ditching of commercial aircraft, where he paid par tic u lar attention to the lessons for pitch, speed, and level wings. The evolution of Captain Sullenberger shows us that the habit of refl ection is more than simply taking stock of a personal experience or the observed experiences of others. At its most powerful this habit involves engagement of the mind through generation, visualization, and mental rehearsal.
Elaboration
When we met the pianist Thelma Hunter, she was learning four new works for an upcoming concert per for mance: pieces by Mozart, Faure, Rachmaninoff, and William Bolcom. Hunter, who is eighty- eight, won her fi rst prize as a pianist at age fi ve in New York and has been performing ever since. She is not a prodigy, she insists, nor even particularly renowned, but she is accomplished. In addition to a busy life raising six kids with her husband, Sam, a heart surgeon, Hunter has enjoyed a long life of learning, teaching, and performing at the piano, and she is still in the game, sought after and bent to her life’s plea sure at the keyboard.
Giving new learning multiple layers of meaning has been central to Hunter’s methods and illustrates the way elaboration
Make It Stick ê 224
