Editing Michael Ende (section)

===Commercial success: writing ''Jim Knopf''===
In the late 1950s, Ende wrote his first novel ''Jim Button''.
{{Quote|I sat down at my desk and wrote: "The country in which the engine-driver, Luke, lived was called Morrowland. It was a rather small country." Once I'd written the two lines, I hadn't a clue how the third line might go. I didn't start out with a concept or a plan—I just left myself drift from one sentence and one thought to the next. That's how I discovered that writing could be an adventure. The story carried on growing, new characters started appearing, and to my astonishment different plotlines began to weave together. The manuscript was getting longer all the time and was already much more than a picture book. I finally wrote the last sentence ten months later, and a great stack of paper had accumulated on the desk.}}
Michael Ende always said that ideas only came to him when the logic of the story required them. On some occasions he waited a long time for inspiration to arrive. At one point during the writing of ''Jim Button'' the plot reached a dead end. Jim and Luke were stuck among black rocks and their tank engine couldn't go any further. Ende was at a loss to think of a way out of the adventure, but cutting the episode struck him as disingenuous. Three weeks later he was about to shelve the novel when suddenly he had an idea—the steam from the tank engine could freeze and cover the rocks in snow, thus saving his characters from their scrape. "In my case, writing is primarily a question of patience," he once commented.<ref name=birth>{{Cite web|url=http://www.michaelende.de/en/author/biography/a-famous-first-line-that-gave-birth-to-a-novel|title = A Famous First Line That Gave Birth to a Novel|date = 17 March 2011}}</ref>

After nearly a year the five hundred pages of manuscript were complete. Over the next eighteen months he sent the manuscript to ten different publishers, but they all responded that it was "Unsuitable for our list" or "Too long for children". In the end he began to lose hope and toyed with the idea of throwing away the script. He eventually tried it at a small family publishing-house, K. {{Interlanguage link multi|Thienemann Verlag|de}} in Stuttgart. Michael Ende's manuscript was accepted by company director Lotte Weitbrecht who liked the story. Her only stipulation was that the manuscript had to be published as two separate books.

The first of the ''Jim Button'' novels was published in 1960. About a year later, on the morning of the announcement that his novel, ''Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver'', had won the German Prize for Children's Fiction, Ende was being sued by his landlady for seven months' rent back payment. With the prize money of five thousand marks, Michael Ende's financial situation improved substantially, and his writing career began in earnest. After the awards ceremony, he embarked on his first reading tour, and within a year, the first ''Jim Knopf'' book was also nominated for the [[Hans Christian Andersen Award]] and received the Berlin Literary Prize for Youth Fiction. The second ''Jim Knopf'' novel, ''Jim Button and the Wild Thirteen'', was published in 1962. Both books were serialized on radio and TV, and the [[Augsburger Puppenkiste]] famously adapted the novels in a version filmed by Hesse's broadcasting corporation. The print-runs sold out so rapidly that K. Thienemanns could barely keep up. Translations into numerous foreign languages soon followed.<ref name=birth/>