One morning I got up and said to my wife: “That’s it!” I’d found the answer: time could only be stolen from those who tried to hoard it. I needed to find some kind of rule that derived from the logic of the story. I had to solve a dilemma: if the grey men could steal everyone’s time, why was Momo an exception? Of course, a lazy writer could always have taken the easy way out and given Momo some kind of special power - a magic cloak or something. I’d developed my characters, and I’d completed some of the chapters, but for six years I was unable to finish the novel because I was missing a fundamental rule.
‘I’d already drafted the majority of the scenes. In the case of Momo, the book couldn’t be finished until a specific problem had been solved. Michael Ende’s persistence was usually rewarded, although on some occasions he felt like giving up. When working on a novel, he often wrote just two or three sides, made a few notes and then waited for the story to develop and the book to run its course. Whenever he felt uncertain about a particular revision, he would keep both versions and postpone the decision for a while. Some of his poems were honed over decades, with new verses added over time.
Michael Ende’s idiosyncratic writing process gave his texts time to mature, for he often stopped and re-started, musing over a story or a poem and laying it aside until his ideas had taken shape.
Momo took six years to write, although Ende often stopped work and turned to other projects, sometimes working on several texts at any one time. Many of the stories were only completed years later for the collection Mirror in the Mirror.Įven before his move to Rome, Michael Ende had worked on drafts for Momo, but most of the novel was written in Italy and was almost certainly influenced by Italian culture and the Italian way of life. Time and time again he experimented with short stories, but always gave up in exasperation, unable to find a way around conventional narrative logic that required every event to have a logical cause. His literary ambition was to create a cohesive world that didn’t necessarily correlate to reality but that dealt with real themes. Ever since the publication of Jim Button, Michael Ende had been trying to develop a style of fantasy writing in-keeping with his own goals.
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