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LOS ANGELES, June 7 (UPI) -- How I Met Your Mother co-creator Carter Bays said his first novel, The Mutual Friend, out Tuesday, was inspired by changes in the dating world since the show ended in 2013. "I started thinking, 'What's different about now than back in 2005? How is dating different?" Bays told UPI in a recent Zoom interview. "The answer is in one word: apps."
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The Mutual Friend story begins in 2015, when Alice and her new roommate, Roxy, meet Bob via a dating app. Alice's sister, Pitterpat, is married to Bill, the successful developer of a lifestyle app called Me Want That, which helps users decide on products they want.
Alice finds apps and social media distracting from her goal to study for the Medical College Admission Test. Bays said Alice's struggle to concentrate was inspired by his career after How I Met Your Mother.
"I had been working on How I met Your Mother every day for hours and hours and hours, and then I stopped," Bays said. "How do I get this feeling back of being focused on a goal?"
Bays evokes a feeling of distraction via his prose. A paragraph can follow Alice's shifting focus between different events, social media platforms and reality TV shows, and even shift between multiple characters in the same paragraph.
"I try to not just make it about what our phones are doing to us, but just how we think and how our minds get in the way," Bays said. "I think it's a common struggle for anyone: the battle between focusing on what you're supposed to be doing and thinking about something else."
In 2014, Bays and co-creator Craig Thomas developed a follow-up to How I Met Your Mother. CBS passed on the first version of How I Met Your Dad, though a new version of How I Met Your Father premiered on Hulu this year.
Bays said he continued to think about how the world had changed since How I Met Your Mother began. He chose to set the book in 2015, and said he was later glad he'd set it before the Trump presidency and pandemic so it could encapsulate the world just before those events.
"The Mutual Friend is very much part of me trying to really put my thumb down on what's going on in the world," Bays said. "I really tried to put a glass cover over the summer of 2015 and our relationship to technology at that particular moment in human history."
Like How I Met Your Mother, The Mutual Friend balances many stories at once. Alice's MCAT preparation and love life are the central focus, but what she discovers about Bob leads to stories about his life.
Roxy's job at the mayor's office fuels some subplots, while the book also devotes time to Pitterpat and Bill's marriage. Bays said he used Aeon Timeline software to help him keep track of the story threads.
"In a book like this that had the characters and so many things going on at once, it was very important to keep it all locked in somewhere," Bays said. "I needed some sort of calendar app or timeline software to just keep track of everything that happened this summer."
Bays said Aeon would have helped him on How I Met Your Mother, too. The sitcom frequently returned to past events from different characters' perspectives, and the final season took place over one wedding weekend.
"I felt like I was using a lot of the muscles that I was using in planning out a season of How I Met Your Mother," Bays said. "It was a very fun challenge, and I was excited to be able to use that part of my brain again."
Some of the events in The Mutual Friend were inspired by true stories, too.
Bays took a course in Buddhism after How I Met Your Mother ended. So, Bill also takes a Buddhism course, but in the book, his extreme pursuit of enlightenment causes problems in his marriage.
"Bill just can't hit the brakes," Bays said. "It leads to an actual religious experience for Bill that just complicates the lives of everyone around him."
Since Bays comes from television, he said it is possible he might adapt The Mutual Friend as a series one day. As a new novelist, he said he enjoyed creating characters without having to think of which actors could play them.
Bays and Thomas are developing another project together. Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger are showrunning How I Met Your Father.
"I've loved writing something [where] these characters exist in your head and only in your head," Bay said. "I'm excited for people to enjoy it in that way."
