How I Met Your Mother’s second episode has some surprising literary roots, according to series co-creator Craig Thomas.

On the most recent episode of their How We Made Your Mother podcast, Thomas explained to star Josh Radnor that one of the challenges he and co-creator Carter Bays faced when it came time to write the second episode of the show’s first season was how to incorporate Cobie Smulders’ Robin into the main cast. The show’s pilot saw Radnor’s Ted meeting — and quickly falling head over heels for — Robin. But as Thomas noted, the character really hadn’t interacted with Ted’s established friend group.

To solve that problem, Thomas said the writers turned to none other than F. Scott Fitzgerald.

“Like any CBS sitcom in 2005, we were mostly working off The Great Gatsby,” Thomas joked.

As Thomas explained, Jay Gatsby, the mysterious millionaire at the center of Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, throws lavish parties at his Long Island mansion hoping to lure his lost love, Daisy Buchanan, back into his life.

“He’s just hoping that by having this opulent mansion, it will be like a magnet that calls her over from her green light across the water in Long Island,” Thomas, himself a Long Island native, said.

Thomas and Bays were inspired to build HIMYM’s second episode, “Purple Giraffe,” around Ted inviting Robin to several different parties in an effort to get to know her better — with the added bonus that she would be thrown into the mix with his friends.

“I felt like that was part of the idea of these parties,” Thomas said. “Ted’s gonna throw these parties, and it’s gonna lure in Robin. And that was sort of the little literary spark.”

Radnor said he had no idea that had been the inspiration behind the episode. “I wish I would have known that. That would have been something that would really have delighted me,” he said.

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Thomas explained that the initial idea was to have Ted throw one big bash.

“I remember feeling very afraid of that because party scenes are hard to write. They’re hard to shoot. If the whole episode takes place at one big party, there’s that kind of, like, loss of energy,” Thomas said. “I was worried it didn’t really feel like our show or our pilot, which was jumping around in time, lots of short scenes.”

Shifting to three different parties, he said, helped further define the show’s non-linear style and set it apart from other sitcoms.

“It’s three parties that sort of take place over three days. And within that, we’ll jump around a lot, and we’ll find ways to show that we’re not just doing, like, it’s a sitcom episode with a party, and it’s mostly set there,” he recalled. “I remember being very afraid of that, afraid we’d, like, lose energy and seem more linear and, you know, like, traditional if we did a party episode in episode two. I remember always, even once we got the idea of chopping up into three parties, I remember I never quite shook the fear that, like, ‘Ah, this is just gonna be a wacky party episode. How do we make it different?’ ”

Once they decided to play with the sequence of events in the episode and incorporate things like both Ted’s and Barney’s (Neil Patrick Harris) fantasies of how one of the parties might go, Thomas said, “that’s the moment where it became a HIMYM episode.”