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.

WHEN Warwick Thornton wanted to tell the truth about the community he grew up in, his cinematic inspiration came from New Zealand.

“I remember seeing movies like Once Were Warriors when I was a kid and going ‘wow’,” says the Aboriginal director (right) whose first feature length film was released in New Zealand on October 1.

“Can we make stories like that? Can we tell harder indigenous stories like that?”

His answer is Samson and Delilah, the story of a romance between petrol sniffer Samson and thick-skinned, tender-hearted Delilah (played by 14-year-old newcomers, Rowan McNamara and Marissa Gibson) amid the grim realities of life in a poor, rural indigenous community.

But for Warwick, the small budget and documentary style cinematography make something “real” for audiences who have learned about Aboriginal culture only from five o’clock news and the romantic stereotypes of mainstream film and Qantas commercials.

“You know, Australia hasn’t seen a film like this before,” and it is a version of the Aboriginal story that is long overdue, he says.

Samson: 14 year-old Rowan McNamara as Samson.

“I could have released it five years ago. I could have released it 10 years ago. The sad fact is that I could probably release it in 10 years’ time and the issues and the story behind would probably be the same,” he says.

When asked why he chose the biblical story of Samson and Delilah to underpin those issues, Warwick says he could not have made a movie about the communities without religion.

Like its biblical namesake, Warwick’s Samson and Delilah delivers its message by exploring the power roles men and women play in each other’s lives.

“The film is a homage to women, because in our communities a lot of the strength is from the women,” he says.

14 year-old Marissa Gibson as Delilah.

Delilah is “empowered” to take on the traditionally male role of hunting when Samson finally succumbs to his addiction, and her return to faith at end of the film is less about God and more about strength and survival.

Unlike the original story, however, it is not Delilah but Samson -Warwick’s Aboriginal “everyman” – who cuts off his hair and gives up his masculine power.

“I put those scenes in for my own community to say ‘look at this. It’s supposed to be all this manly lore and culture and half of you are completely blimmin’ useless and the women are doing all the work’,” he says.

Warwick, who has plans to create scholarships and writing schemes for rural Aboriginal children, believes there is no point in making a movie unless it is going to do something for society.

“It is my community and I shine a really hard light on it and our people, but I believe you need to air out those sorts of festering sores so they can get better.

“If you hide it and close it all up, you might have to amputate the whole limb in a sense.”

Samson and Delilah opened last week at The Penthouse in Brooklyn and The Lighthouse Cinema, Petone.