Today, we're interviewing Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate and instructor, Barbara A. Barnett. She's teaching a course entitled, "All the World’s a Page: Adapting Acting Techniques to Strengthen Your Fiction."
Apply now through January 18, 2026. You will learn about several different acting techniques and how they can be applied to various aspects of your writing.
Apply now through January 18, 2026. You will learn about several different acting techniques and how they can be applied to various aspects of your writing.
Before we chat with Barbara, here's more about her incredible writing journey:
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/.
-- Interview by Nicole Pyles
WOW: Thank you so much, Barbara, for your time. I have to say that I love the name of your class you're teaching at Odyssey. And you actually have a background in performing arts! How did you make that connection between acting techniques and writing?
Barbara: I was studying opera performance as an undergraduate. In opera, you need to be an actor as well as a singer, so one of my instructors assigned a book called A Practical Handbook for the Actor. I’d been doing theater since I was a teenager, but that book was my first dive into studying any kind of formal acting technique. I’d also been writing since I was a kid, and one of the first things that struck me while reading was, “Oh my god, this would be really useful for writing too!” In particular, I found the book’s scene analysis technique useful for deciding on the best actions to describe on the page—the ones that would reveal character and not just serve as “well, something needs to happen between the dialogue” filler. Ever since then, I’ve become an absolute nerd about exploring the intersections between acting and writing.
WOW: I love that connection you found. You are a graduate of Odyssey Writing Workshop. Why did you decide to join their workshop?
Barbara: I’d been writing regularly and submitting my work for a couple of years when I felt like I hit a wall. The feedback I was getting from writing groups had become less helpful than when I first started out, tending towards, “Here are a few nitpicks, but otherwise this is great and publishable as is.” Yet I was still struggling to sell my stories. Many of the rejections I was receiving were of the “This is well written but” variety, and I wanted to turn those near misses into acceptances. I’d heard about Odyssey through word of mouth and thought a more intensive workshop environment like that was exactly what I needed to level up my work—and I was right! I applied, and much to my surprise (oh hi, impostor syndrome) was accepted. Almost two decades later, it remains one of the best things I’ve ever done for my writing.
WOW: That type of feedback sounds familiar to me. You know when you're ready for more! You are also a critiquer for their critique service. What writing lessons have you learned by reading the stories of those who submit to that critique service?
Barbara: To provide a helpful critique, I need to not only identify what is and isn’t working, but be able to explain why and offer suggestions that are in keeping with the writer’s vision for the story. Doing that for other writers has made me more mindful of how I’m addressing those issues in my own work.
Because critiquing requires me to break things down in an organized fashion for the writer, the process has also made me hyperaware of how much everything is intertwined in a story. It’s often difficult to talk about one concept in isolation of the others because, for example, character influences plot and vice versa. Issues with description are often related to issues with point of view. Slow pacing is usually the result of problems in other areas. So while it’s necessary to break things down, I’ve learned the importance of also looking at the big picture and how all the various story elements are working together.
WOW: That's great insight! What can writers expect from taking this course?
Barbara: First the disclaimer: they won’t be required to do any actual acting in front of anyone. You don’t have to be an actor to learn to think like one.
My goal is to give writers a new set of acting-inspired tools they can apply to their fiction, and not just to dialogue and emotion. Some people think acting is about how many lines you have and how you say them, but there’s so much more to it. Character development, plot, POV, description, pacing, subtext, setting—this class is going to touch on all of them. Some more than others—emotion, for example, is obviously a big one coming from an acting standpoint—but as I mentioned in answer to the previous question, everything’s interconnected.
Another thing I hope will be valuable is the number of different approaches we’re going to look at. There are many different schools of thought on acting, and not all of them agree with each other—but that’s helpful, I think, because not all of our brains are wired the same way. A technique that works for Person A isn’t necessarily going to work for Person B. Or one technique might be better suited to the type of story you’re writing than another one would be. So one of my goals with this course is to give writers a variety of techniques they can try out to see which ones work for them.
WOW: I appreciate that you explore different approaches. Who is the course ideal for?
Barbara: I think the course will be most useful to intermediate writers—someone who has a grasp of the basics but feels like there might be something missing, or they simply want to try out new approaches to strengthen their writing. While the class is going to touch on a lot of different areas, I think it will be particularly useful for writers who want to dive deeper into character, emotion, and dialogue.
WOW: Great to know! For writers hesitant about investing in themselves through courses, what words of wisdom can you share?
Barbara: If you have the time and the means, and if you can leave your ego at the door, I find it’s worth the investment more often than not. If you have a good teacher, someone who is supportive and constructive with their feedback (which I strive to be!), the worst that can usually happen is you come away with reinforcement that you’re on the right track. The best that can happen is a massive number of lightbulbs go off and you improve your writing in significant ways, which is what happened for me when I attended Odyssey. But even if you take only one small thing away from a class, it can be worth it. In keeping with my course topic, I’m going to share a quote from actress Uta Hagen’s book Respect for Acting: “All tedious research is worth one inspired moment.”
WOW: I love that quote. Can you share any specific techniques, just maybe as a sampling, that actors use to make their characters come to life that our writers can keep in mind?
Barbara: Since I mentioned Uta Hagen in my previous answer, let’s go with her. One of the techniques the class is going to explore is a set of nine questions she developed for character development. What I like about this set of questions is that it asks you to look at more than just the character’s background (though that’s part of it too). It’s more than just a collection of biographical details. The questions ask you to focus on things such as the character’s relationship to the setting, which can be helpful for deepening point of view, leading you to understand which details your character would notice and how they feel about them. There are also questions about goals, obstacles, and the actions the character will take in pursuit of their goals, which can help you create things like tension and plot momentum.
WOW: Thank you for sharing that sampling! And thank you so much for your time today. Your course sounds like it will be incredibly helpful for our writers.
Remember, you have until now and January 18, 2026 to apply to All the World’s a Page: Adapting Acting Techniques to Strengthen Your Fiction," taught by instructor Barbara A. Barnett. It's a worthy investment if you are ready to reach your writing goals in 2026!
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