Duncan Wright and fellow challengers gather at Verve Cafe for their kick off party.

IT CAN take years for a seasoned author to finish a novel, but 30 over-caffeinated Wellingtonians plan to do it in a month.

Duncan Wright, from Highbury, is one of 390 New Zealanders pounding away at their laptops for National Novel Writing Month, a challenge to write a 55,000 word novel through November.

Duncan, 32, is no stranger to the event: he has completed the challenge every November for the past six years.

“I usually tell my friends what I’m up to and they look at me like a complete crazy and say, ‘Why don’t you read a book?’”, he says.

The British expat has always wanted to be a writer, but never had the discipline to do it until he heard about the event online.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy, however. Of 119,301 participants who took part worldwide last year, only 18% completed their novels.

At the start, Duncan says, he feels great to be under way. “Then you’re like ‘uh, I want to die, I want to stop, why do I keep doing this to myself?’”

This year will be especially tough for Duncan. He’ll be aiming to type an average of 1667 words a day on the novel, while also working on his PhD in biology at Victoria University.

The key to success, he says, is resisting the urge to edit.

“The principle is that you don’t care about quality as you go along. You free yourself up from getting stuck and continuously trying to rework a single sentence and never getting very far.”

Duncan intends to publish one of his works but says he will die before he lets anyone read last year’s novel, where he switched from science fiction to romance.

“I didn’t know you can’t be evil to your characters in romance, you can’t blow them up, which is always my solution to a problem in science fiction.

“You can have ninjas attack or blow something up [but] you just can’t do that in a romance story. Well, it doesn’t usually work.”

As one of New Zealand’s municipal liaisons for this challenge, Duncan organises meetings for Wellington participants during the month and arranged for writer Doug Wilkins to speak at the group’s kick-off party on Halloween.

This is the first event for Northland resident, Tegan Southon, 24, who says she plans to become a writer and feels confident she will complete the challenge.

Annabel Youens, 33, a Canadian living in Newtown, says she had a false start prior to this year: “I signed up before but I got really drunk on Halloween and didn’t end up doing it,” she says.

“This is it, I’m going to make it happen this year.”

Although the writing has begun, aspiring speed writers can still sign up at www.nanowrimo.org.