We worked on mapping out a scene (or doing our homework) so that the scene is broken up in such a way to give us more acting choices (so that we're more in control). We broke the scene up into beats and dynamics - saying exactly where we were going to pause and where we would add emphasis.
Creating a more interesting character:
To help make every character more interesting we wrote down a quick backstory to help us make deliberate acting choices. We chose 3 things for each character - giving each character a distinctive attitude in the scene (to tell us how we would deliver our lines and how we should react to other lines), a big action to help define that attitude (giggling if ditsy, crying if sad, ect), and we used each beat to help move both of these things forward (in each pause we would only help move our 2 additional things we added to the backstory - making them longer/ forcing us to act bigger in each one).
The result was having a more interesting character - one that is memorable, and contributes to the scene, regardless of the amount of lines they have.