Alana B. Lytle is a screenwriter whose recent credits include Netflix's Brand New Cherry Flavor and Peacock's A Friend of the Family. Her short fiction has been published in Guernica. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and sausage-shaped dog. Man's Best Friend is her debut novel.

Q: Congratulations on your debut novel! What inspired you to write MAN'S BEST FRIEND, and how did the idea for this story come about?

So, the whole thing was inspired by this eerie interaction that happened more than a decade ago, when I woke up in my shoebox apartment on the Lower East Side missing my credit card. Before I could even search for it, I got a Facebook message from this guy saying he'd found my card on the street. He asked if he could return it to me "over drinks." The line between meet-cute and meet-creepy can be blurry, so despite the oddness of the message, I, in all my single hopefulness, went to meet this man. Nothing sinister happened in the end, but the encounter was strange, for sure. A few years ago I was telling this story to a friend and realized it could be a good jumping-off point for something fictional. Who would I have had to be and who would he have had to be for a relationship to ensue after such an uncomfortable first encounter?

Q: What was your approach to blending suspense and with a hint of surrealism in the story, and how did you maintain a balance between these elements?

I always wanted Man's Best Friend to feel, maybe not five minutes in the future, but two minutes in the future. Though never explicitly stated in the novel, it’s set in 2026, so I tried to imagine plausible 2026 realities. Perhaps the idea of tame American dogs running away en masse doesn't feel plausible, but who knows? It could happen. I hope it doesn't though. I'm obsessed with my dog.

Q: How did your experience as a screenwriter influence your approach to writing this novel, particularly in terms of pacing, dialogue, and scene construction?

Screenwriting has tamed and focused my writing wholesale. Before I got into film and TV, I hardly ever outlined my prose, and while that improvisational thing works for some brilliant writers I know, it never did for me. Being in writer's rooms taught me the power of charting a course and justifying every scene. That's how I approached the construction of this novel, adding chapters to Scrivener the same way I would card an episode of television. Sometimes the chapter descriptions just said things like, "She questions reality moment #2."

Q: What is your writing process like, and what do you do when you get stumped? Any magic cures for writer’s block?

There are the unhappy days when six hours of work yields two hundred words, maybe fifty of which I'll actually keep, but, in general, as long as I'm not super sick or spending dedicated time with family, I'm writing every day and my own curiosity keeps me going. I want to know what I'm capable of. Constantly I think of that Ira Glass quote about the gap between taste and ability, how a creative person's good taste is why their own work disappoints them, and how fighting through the disappointment is the only productive thing to do. The idea of the gap between where I am and where I might go inspires me more than it intimidates me. I didn't feel this way when I first graduated Harvard, though, because I was so busy dwelling on where my talented classmates already were. I don't have a magic cure for writer's block, per se, but if self-doubt is the devil behind someone's blockage, my advice to them would be to focus on their own gap, not anyone else's.

Q: As this is your first novel, what were some of the biggest challenges you faced during your writing process for a longer, prose-based work (versus writing for television), and how did you overcome them? Was any part of it easier than you expected?

Writing a longer work was easier than I expected. My main issue was actually how quickly Man's Best Friend came together. I suppose I had this idea that you're not a real novelist unless you fret for ten years over the same manuscript. Maybe ten more years would've made for an even better novel, but maybe not. Every book, I imagine, requires something different.

Q: What do you hope readers take away from MAN'S BEST FRIEND, and are there any particular emotions, thoughts, or themes you aim to evoke for your audience through the story?

El, the protagonist of Man's Best Friend, is no Nick Carraway: she doesn't, after exposure to the luxe life of the East Hampton elite, turn her back on it all, jaded and disgusted by the hypocrisy therein. She doesn't do this because, yes, she's selfish, but also because she knows that there is no escape from the hypocrisy of capitalism. I'm certainly no defender of the uber-rich, as evidenced by this book, but I suppose I'd like people to take away that self-righteous judgment is a faulty weapon. Contributing to our ever-polarizing culture by hardening yourself against people who you perceive as being less virtuous than yourself, particularly if they have less privilege to begin with, is repellent to me. Let's return to Gatsby for a second: Why should Nick, who arranged for his married cousin Daisy to have a secret rendez-vous in his house with the neighbor he wants to impress, stand in such harsh judgment of Daisy, ultimately? How easy it is for Nick, a man with the means to forge his own path, to shake his head at a woman running away from the wreckage she's caused. If you're going to cast stones, at least be aware of your own glass house.

Q: What are your personal favorite works or influential pieces, whether from literature, film, the stage, non-fiction? What’s one piece of media you think every creative should read/watch/listen to?

I'd definitely cite Charlie Kaufman as one of my favorite storytellers. Charlie Brooker, Jesse Armstrong, Damon Lindelof, Alan Ball, Dahvi Waller, Michaela Coel---these are all writer-producers I admire so much. My favorite novel is Freedom; I read it at least once a year. I would call my reading taste eclectic, though--in the past few months I loved Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, Eliza Clark's Boy Parts and Holly Mitchell's excellent poetry collection, Mare's Nest. One piece of media every creative should consume? There are too many answers to this, but certain episodes of Mad Men are as good as it gets.

Q: What do you like to do in your free time? And what’s on the horizon, what are you working on next?

I've been writing on a TV show that was recently announced: it's the Duffer Brothers' newest project and the creation of my good friend Haley Z. Boston. The title is Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen. I'm not sure how specific I'm allowed to be about the rest of what I'm doing, but I'm mid-stream on some exciting feature development and am working on more fiction with every spare moment I have. My happy place besides my laptop is walking my dog in the pink early morning, before it gets too hot and too bright. I’m an East Coast girl at heart—there’s too much sunshine in L.A.