George Penney on Beautiful Words Con and why Silence of the Lambs is actually a romance

Beautiful Words Con is a new independent writing festival launching in Nelson from Tuesday until 26 September, with 30 talks and workshops covering fiction, poetry, songwriting, game writing and indie publishing. Director George Penney is a published author who moved to Nelson three years ago and started writing people-watching vignettes about the community, which then took off both locally and internationally. She's hosting a workshop on how to write a romance novel, and her central argument is that if you understand a basic romance plot structure, you can write almost any genre. Her evidence: Silence of the Lambs is, beat for beat, a romance between Clarice and Hannibal.