All the World’s a Page:
Adapting Acting Techniques to Strengthen Your Fiction
February 24 – March 24, 2026
Deadline: January 18, 2026
Instructor:
Barbara A. Barnett
Level:
Intermediate
Live Class:
7 pm-8:30 pm EST
Tues., February 24
Tues., March 10
Tues., March 24
Tuition:
$259.00
Course Description
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.
Students must be ready to hear about the weaknesses in their writing and work to strengthen them. Students must also be ready to give feedback to their classmates that is both truthful and helpful.
Our goal as a class is to provide a supportive yet challenging environment that will help students improve their writing.
Each student will have a private meeting with Barbara.
Assignments:
Students will have some homework assigned before the first meeting, and will also be assigned homework during the course.
The first assignment will have a due date of February 23, the day before our initial meeting.
Homework will be assigned on February 24 and March 10, with due dates, respectively, of March 2 and March 16. You will also be required to provide critiques of some of your classmates’ work, which will be due on March 9 and March 23. Any student who misses a deadline may be expelled from the class and will receive no refund.
All assignments should be in standard manuscript format and should be submitted as MS Word files or rich text files.
You should reserve a minimum of 5 hours each week to complete homework.
Assignments will include readings, critiquing, writing exercises to practice techniques, writing new material, analyzing your previously written material, and revising previously written material. Students will also be required to reply to online discussion questions during the course.
Barbara will return students’ homework with her feedback by the day before the next class session.
Students are expected to follow guidelines about assignments and class materials established in the Odyssey Online Student Handbook.
Attendance:
Since we will have only 3 class meetings, attendance at every class is necessary for students to get the most out of this course.
You are expected to attend all classes, except in cases of emergency. In such cases, you should notify the instructor.
Classes will be recorded and made available to students for a limited time.
Any student who misses more than one class may be expelled from the course and will receive no refund.
It is your responsibility to find out what happened in any classes you missed and to complete homework by the deadlines.
Students are expected to follow the policies about attendance and behavior set out in the Odyssey Online Student Handbook.
Texts:
Students will be required to complete several readings before the course begins. Additional readings may be required after the course begins.
Technical Requirements:
Technical requirements for all Odyssey Online Classes are covered on the Online Classes page.
Tentative Schedule:
February 24: First class meeting. Introduction and orientation. An overview of various acting techniques. Using Action Objectives to create strong actions that drive the plot forward. Using Personalization techniques to develop a character’s traits and mannerisms. The importance of specificity. How an actor’s movement choices relate to a writer’s word choices. Assignment of homework.
March 2: Homework is due.
March 9: Critiques are due. Homework is returned with Barbara’s feedback.
March 10: Second class meeting. Discussion of previous homework assignment. Using Emotion Memory and Substitution/Transference to portray realistic character responses. Using a character’s Inner Rhythm to lend emotional authenticity to their external actions. Using Emotion Arcs to avoid emotionally flat scenes. Assignment of new homework. Some students will have private meetings with Barbara after class.
March 16: Homework is due.
March 15: Some students will have private meetings with Barbara between 7:00-8:30 PM EST.
March 23: Critiques are due. Homework is returned with Barbara’s feedback.
March 24: Third class meeting. Discussion of previous homework assignment. Using scene analysis to uncover “the truth of the moment” that makes imaginary circumstances feel real. Capturing an actor’s rhythm and intonation when writing dialogue. Making dialogue distinctive and realistic. Using the acting techniques discussed to create subtext. Some students will have private meetings with Barbara after class.
Instructor: Barbara A. Barnett
Barbara A. Barnett is a Philadelphia-area writer, musician, and occasional orchestra librarian. She’s had over 60 short stories published in magazines and anthologies such as Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Fantasy Magazine, Cast of Wonders, GigaNotoSaurus, Weird Horror Magazine, Flash Fiction Online, Black Static, and Wilde Stories: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction. Her novel-length work is represented by Emily Keyes at the Keyes Agency, LLC.
Barbara’s also a theater nerd. On stage, she’s appeared in musicals, operas, and operettas such as The Pirates of Penzance, Oliver!, Sweeney Todd, Iolanthe, Susannah, La Traviata, and a children’s theater adaptation of Snow White. Off stage, she’s worked on the administrative side of the fence for opera and theater companies. Her short play Ghost Writer to the Dead, which she adapted from a short story of the same name, was featured in a local short play festival. She’s also done several lectures on applying acting techniques to writing at The Never-Ending Odyssey (TNEO), a workshop exclusively for Odyssey graduates. You can read her essay “Acting Techniques for Writing Subtext” on the Odyssey Blog.
Barbara earned her Bachelor of Arts in music (vocal performance) and English literature from the University of Maryland and a Masters in Library and Information Science from Rutgers University. A 2007 graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop, she currently serves as managing editor of the workshop’s blog, a critiquer for the Odyssey Critique Service, and spent several years as Resident Supervisor for TNEO. She is also a graduate of Taos Toolbox and a member of the Horror Writers Association (HWA) and the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA).
You can find Barbara online at babarnett.com.