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What do you do after making one of the most successful sitcoms of all time?

Carter Bays, the co-creator of "How I Met Your Mother," turned to fiction. His new novel, "The Mutual Friend," is bursting with side characters and satisfying endings.
Denice Cox Bays

What do you do after creating one of the most popular sitcoms of all time? That was the question Carter Bays found himself pondering after “How I Met Your Mother,” the show he created with fellow Wesleyan classmate Craig Thomas, went off the air in 2014 (and has since been revived, in some form, in a new Hulu show called “How I Met Your Father).

For Bays, the answer was simple, at first: Try and create a new show. And more shows. And more shows. Bays wrote many pilots, none of which made it to the air.

“As more and more shows didn't get picked up, I realized how taxing it was on my soul as a writer to start all these stories and not finish any of them,” Bays told TODAY.

One pilot, in particular, burrowed under his skin: A crowded New York story centered around a young woman named Alice and the many people her life intersects with. Alice wants to go to medical school, and is doing everything in her power to avoid actually putting in the work to go to medical school.

"The Mutual Friend," by Carter Bays

”The show didn’t go anywhere — but I loved the characters too much and I didn’t want to let them go. They had my attention, especially Alice. I needed to see if she could make her dreams happen,” he said. “I realized I needed to tell this story to the end somehow. The problem was, Hollywood wasn’t giving me millions of dollars to turn it into a TV show. That turned me to fiction.”

The ensuing novel, “The Mutual Friend,” is sprawling in the best way, set in a New York City where everyone's a stranger — but no one is, really. Bays gives voice to a cast of side characters (all of whom exude main character energy), lending credence to the idea that everyone plays a role, even if unintended, in each others’ stories. The novel is intellectual but with a beating heart, optimistic but never naive.

Along with Alice, there’s an array of characters like her brother, Bill, a tech founder searching for his next thing; his wife, Pitterpat, who already knows what her next thing is; Alice’s long-lost twin sister whom she never meets; her somewhat chaotic roommate, Roxy; Bob, a serial online dater; Everywhereman, who wanders around the book’s Morningside Heights; an ethicist; a mayor with a funny name; a few bicyclists; and many, many more, all of whom are somehow essential to the plot.

“I tried to fill the book with puzzles and Easter eggs that hopefully will take a long time for people to discover and it will keep people entertained and busy,” Bays said. “For instance there is a little mini story about the former occupants of the apartment that Alice and Roxy live in.”

Like “How I Met Your Mother,” the magic of “The Mutual Friend” comes in watching the master plotter weave all the many storylines together at the end. The story crescendos with characters making surprise appearances in one another's lives, and storylines slotting together. Briefly, the world makes sense.

As for writing the perfect ending? Bays said, “I've learned a lot about that topic,” referring to the finale of “How I Met Your Mother.”

“With this one, I wanted to just leave the characters in a place where I know they're going to be OK,” he said. “Writing the ending was for me what I would hope that reading the ending is — with every page that you get closer to the end, you're little more and more sad, but like you're happy to have had this journey with them and happy to see where they're where they're all ending up.”

Though actually knowing how to stop was difficult, given all of the tangents and sidetracks that already exist. In Bays’ world, everyone is interesting once you get up close.

“The book was like, probably about 50,000 words longer than the one that actually ended up getting published because I loved all the side trips,” he said.

Part of the book’s fun is how the characters’ online and real lives are blended together. Set in 2015, “The Mutual Friend” is steeped in the era of social media — specifically, Facebook (hence the title). Bays set the novel in the recent past, not the present, for a reason.

“Having worked on ‘How I Met Your Mother,’ you realize something that seems so timely right now is immediately going to be dated, and nowhere more than on the internet,” Bays said.

While the platforms have evolved since then, the ethos hasn’t: Like us, the characters in “The Mutual Friend” are living with the superpowers of the internet at their fingertips, able to access an unprecedented amount of information about the world, and about each other.

Cleverly, the novel is narrated by a supercomputer, able to see the way lives intersect through our online activity.

“I was interested in exploring the idea of an omniscient narrator — especially nowadays, when omniscience is almost theoretically possible, because there's so much information out there. If you could somehow see everything, all at once, on every hard drive, how many connections would we see that nobody would have noticed?”

Much has been said about the internet and its role in affecting society, livelihoods, attention spans, elections and beyond. But in “The Mutual Friend,” the internet is less an economy, and more a shiny new toy with the potential to bring us together.

Bays, even as time goes on, remains fascinated by the internet, and wrote a book to pay homage to the humanity that’s still possible through the medium.

“I wanted to honor it and acknowledge that we're really living through a revolution that no one in the history of human civilization has ever lived through. I think we're not evolved as a species to communicate in the way we do now; we’re still figuring it out. I wanted to tell that story and all of its ridiculousness and all its silliness and see people trying and failing and doing their best. We haven't quite learned how to ride the bicycle yet, and we keep falling over,” he said.

We may not have figured out the internet — but Bays has figured out this medium. After years of going to the “edge of the diving board” of a fiction, has taken the plunge. Compared to the "cocktail party" of a TV writers room, writing a book was isolating, but it “suited him” as a husband and father of three.

“I very much wrote it with my kids in mind. They've been seeing me go to work every day their whole lives. At a certain point I wanted there to be something on the shelf that they could point to and say OK, that's what dad was doing all this time,” he said.

Now, he’s looking forward to the next one.

“I cannot wait to write another book. I have my laptop. My desk is clear. I've got a nice, good room to write in. I just need an idea, and I’m ready to go,” he said.