2026 Odyssey Online Classes

Apply by January 18, 2026

Odyssey’s Winter Online Classes are here! Build new skills and make your writing stronger and more memorable.

We’ve got three courses to choose from. Attend live, online class sessions for intensive instruction and an interactive experience. Assignments provide deep practice in trying out the new techniques you learn. Feedback from the instructor and your classmates will help you improve even more. A private meeting with the instructor will allow you to hone in on your particular concerns.

Our three instructors, successful authors of horror, fantasy, and SF, have been highly praised by students. The best way to succeed as a writer is to continue to build your skills.

And we’ve got a live webinar, taught by award-winning editor/publisher Scott H. Andrews of Beneath Ceaseless Skies: Story Openings That Engage. Register for the webinar before we run out of spots!

Worldbuilding in Fantastic Fiction
Course Meets: Thursdays, March 5 – April 2, 2026
Instructor: Melissa Scott

Award-winning author Melissa Scott has been a repeat guest lecturer at the Odyssey Writing Workshop, providing extremely helpful lectures on worldbuilding. We’re very excited she agreed to teach Worldbuilding in Fantastic Fiction this year.

Worldbuilding forms the strong foundation for fantastic fiction. In this course, Melissa will discuss worldbuilding as a springboard for character and plot, and the mechanics of revealing that world to readers. She will cover methods for creating truly original worlds, as well as where and when to rely on the conventions of the genre.

This course will focus intensely on the task of worldbuilding. Melissa will discuss the qualities of a strong world and the techniques that help writers create strong worlds. She will identify the principles by which worlds work. She’ll explain the decisions you need to make, in the order you need to make them, to build a compelling, internally consistent world. You’ll explore examples of weak settings and strong ones. Melissa will explain how to identify contradictions in the world and how to decide whether to eliminate those contradictions or use them to create mystery and conflict in your world. She’ll discuss how to build your world in concert with other story elements, such as character and plot, and explain why making such connections is critical to the success of your story. You’ll learn how to incorporate your world into your story and how to find the right balance between world and story. A fascinating world will not be an asset to your story unless you’re able to gracefully include information about the world into the story. Melissa will explain methods for revealing your world that strengthen the story rather than weaken or distract from it. Melissa will also show how point of view can control the way the reader sees the world and offer additional opportunities to explain your world. You’ll learn the importance of research for worldbuilding and receive tips for worldbuilding research.

The course is intended for writers of fantasy, science fiction, and horror, and will cover issues relevant in middle grade, young adult, and adult fiction. It will be most valuable for beginner/intermediate writers.

“Melissa Scott helped me realize my world needs a backstory as much as my characters do. With her lecture and exercises, she immersed me in the job of creating a world and society with internal integrity, rich with possibilities for storytelling. I highly recommend this course to any writer of spec fiction.” –Pete Aldin

All the World’s a Page: Adapting Acting Techniques to Strengthen Your Fiction
Course Meets: Tuesdays, February 24 – March 24, 2026
Instructor: Barbara A. Barnett

We’ve got an exciting new instructor for Odyssey Online this year. Barbara A. Barnett is an Odyssey graduate with a unique mix of writing and performing skills. She’s had over sixty short stories published and has performed in musicals, operas, and operettas. Barbara has given fascinating lectures at The Never-Ending Odyssey (the program for Odyssey Writing Workshop and Your Personal Odyssey graduates) for many years, several of them focused on how to adapt acting techniques to improve your fiction writing. These lectures have opened up so many possibilities for participants to strengthen characters, emotion, point of view, plot, description, dialogue, and subtext. Now she’s bringing her invaluable techniques to Odyssey Online in her course, All the World’s a Page: Adapting Acting Techniques to Strengthen Your Fiction. 

Have you ever envied the way actors make their characters look and sound like real people, full of nuance, depth, and complicated emotions? Have you ever wished you could capture that in your writing? Good news: many of the tools actors use can be adapted to short stories and novels, and in this course, you’ll learn how. Don’t worry, no acting experience is required, and you won’t be expected to perform in front of anyone—but you will be expected to write!

Students will learn about several different acting techniques and how they can be applied to various aspects of their writing, including: developing characters; portraying emotion; deepening point of view; creating plot momentum through a better understanding of how a character’s goals and emotions influence their decisions; strengthening description through the use of specific, character-revealing details; crafting realistic and distinctive-sounding dialogue; and conveying subtext. We’ll also explore the pitfalls that come with this approach—turning the movie in your head into words isn’t as easy as some people think—and how to deal with them.

Again, you won’t be required to do any acting in front of your classmates. Instead, through lecture, examples, writing exercises, and discussion, we’ll adapt these techniques to the written word, whether it’s new material or revisions of a work in progress. By the end of the course, you’ll have a new set of acting-inspired tools to strengthen your storytelling, all without ever stepping foot on a stage.

The course is intended for writers of fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Yet the techniques covered can help improve all fiction writing, so fiction writers who focus on other genres could profit from this class and would be welcome. The course will cover issues relevant in middle grade, young adult, and adult fiction. It will be most valuable for intermediate writers since it will assume students already understand the basics of fiction writing.

One Brick at a Time: Crafting Compelling Scenes
Course Meets: Tuesdays, March 3 – March 31, 2026
Instructor: Barbara Ashford

Our third online course this season will be taught by award-winning novelist Barbara Ashford. Barbara has been an outstanding, top-rated instructor for Odyssey Online for 16 years, sharing her wide-ranging knowledge and providing deep feedback to students that has helped them make major improvements in their writing. Barbara will be teaching One Brick at a Time: Crafting Compelling Scenes.

Compelling scenes pull readers into a new world, evoke an emotional response to the characters and conflicts, and encourage readers to turn the page to find out what happens next. Failure to fine-tune these essential building blocks of your story can dilute its power and impact.

This course will explore ways to help you add tension, drama, and power to your scenes by

• examining the fundamentals of scene design—from its overall shape to its individual beats;
• exploring the characteristics of effective scenes and the common pitfalls that can undermine their impact;
• providing tools to diagnose “ailing” scenes and bring them back to life;
• discussing the “special needs” of opening and closing scenes, and flashbacks;
• considering each scene as “part of the whole” by understanding its role in developing characters, showcasing the world, and fulfilling the implicit promise you are making to readers.

The course is intended for all fiction writers, with an emphasis on those who write fantastic fiction, and is appropriate for writers of middle grade, young adult, and adult fiction. It will be most valuable for intermediate writers, since it assumes students already understand the basics of writing.

“As a pantser, when I sit down to write a scene, I often feel like I’m reaching my hand into a black box, pulling a scene out, and then jiggling the tangle of words onto the page. Sometimes, a scene leaves me breathless; it’s pure perfection, only a few tweaks needed here or there, and I feel like a true magician. But most of the time, only a puddle forms on the page—my protagonist wandering around a desert, while I wonder if I’ve lost my special touch. One Brick at a Time is changing that for me! Now, when I reach into my pretty black box, I’m reaching with intention. My fingers have learned how to differentiate between form and puddle. But we can’t always summon fully formed scenes from a box. Barbara’s engaged teaching and insightful feedback has helped me learn how to distill my puddled scenes into narratives that tug at my heart and soul. Take the class, you won’t regret it!” –Nastassja Noell

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Story Openings That Engage
Live Webinar: Sunday, April 2, 2026
Instructor: Scott H. Andrews

We’re also offering a live webinar, Story Openings That Engage, by one of our most popular instructors, Scott H. Andrews, editor-in-chief and publisher of the ten-time Hugo Award finalist and World Fantasy Award-winning online fantasy magazine Beneath Ceaseless Skies. 

A great opening draws the reader into the story, but every subgenre, style, and story presents different challenges for crafting an opening that’s best for it. Is your opening making the promise to readers that you plan for the story to deliver? Are you setting up the world or character or theme elements that you want the story to develop (or subvert)? Are you controlling aspects like the focus, exposition, and perspective to steer the reader where you want them to go (and not where you don’t)? Scott H. Andrews, multiple Hugo and World Fantasy Award-finalist editor of Beneath Ceaseless Skies magazine, will break down openings from short stories across a range of subgenres and styles to reveal methods of creating opening paragraphs that engage the reader. He’ll share factors to consider in deciding where best to take an opening after that critical paragraph. And he’ll explore strategies to shape a story’s opening to fit your story and its audience.

The three-hour webinar will be comprised of a two-hour lecture followed by a one-hour question-and-answer session.

The webinar is intended for writers of short stories of fantasy, science fiction, or horror. Yet openings are important in all short fiction, so writers of other genres could benefit from this webinar and would be welcome. The webinar will be most valuable for intermediate writers.

Webinar attendance is limited to 50 students, so the maximum may be reached before the registration deadline on April 1, 2026.

Online Classes: Apply by January 18, 2026

Webinar: Register by April 1, 2026

If you’re willing to work hard, hear about the weaknesses in your writing, move outside your comfort zone, and try new techniques, then Odyssey Online is for you.

Odyssey also offers many resources for writers, including podcasts, an online monthly discussion salon, a blog, a critique service, coaching, consultations, and Your Personal Odyssey Writing Workshop, an intensive, one-on-one online workshop, customized for you.