Writer Caroline O’Donoghue and producers Matt Jordan Smith and Chelsea Morgan Hoffman took a break from filming upcoming series The Rachel Incident to lift the lid on how the project came together and the challenges of adapting a book for the small screen. 

Speaking at Dublin’s Storyhouse screenwriting festival in a panel moderated by Morgan Hoffman, O’Donoghue told an audience at the Light House Cinema that failure was a big part of the process of honing your screenwriting craft. 

“My history as a novelist is public because I have the novels there on the shelves,” she said. “My history as a screenwriter is private because it has previously been a failure.” 

The Irish author has written seven novels, mainly in the YA space, while her bestselling novel The Rachel Incident was her first adult book. 

“I have written a lot of books that have failed and the reason I have done this is because I have only listened to what I want to write,” she said. “I truly believe that you cannot write to a trend, you cannot write whatever is emerging on TikTok. It will be dead in three days. You have to listen to yourself. And because I’ve only ever done that, sometimes I have written things that have succeeded and sometimes I haven’t and I don’t regret any of it, because the experience of doing it is just the same, which is a joy.”

The Rachel Incident is set in Cork in 2010 and follows a student working at a bookstore when she meets James, who is effervescent and insistently heterosexual. The two become friends and roommates and when Rachel admits to a huge crush on her professor, James helps her devise a launch for his new book at the store with the hope she might seduce him afterwards. 

The series, which is currently in production for Channel 4, Universal Content Production and Element Pictures, stars Máiréad Tyers, Ellis Howard, Sarah Greene and Daniel Ings. 

O’Donoghue admitted that she had written “five or six” scripts beforehand but adapting her own work for TV was a different challenge. “Writing novels is a difficult and lonely craft, yes, but it’s also one where you hold the keys to everything.” 

She continued: “Obviously these characters are very clear to me. I’ve been with them for a long time but nonetheless, when you have written a novel, you didn’t write it with eight forty-five-minute-long episodes in mind, with ad breaks. That’s not how we think of things. So, breaking that down was important. One of the huge structural changes that happened from the book to the show is the fact that the book is a first-person perspective, so we only ever know what Rachel knows.” 

For the series, O’Donoghue said, she felt it would benefit to have the perspectives of all the other characters to see “the totality of what that relationship is.” 

Jordan Smith, who heads up Elliot Page’s Page Boy Productions recalled his first impressions of reading The Rachel Incident. “Personally, as a gay man, I could not express how deeply important the women in my life have been and I have struggled to see it captured so eloquently and beautifully in the way that Caroline did in her book,” he said. “It’s both messy, which is true, but the deepest kind of love and respect you could possibly imagine. 

“And Rachel in the book just screamed at me in a way that I had not felt in a long time. It was really exciting. I knew everyone was going to go after this book – and they did. It was competitive. So, I just dug deep and put together a deck and got an opportunity to get in front of Caroline and just poured my heart out on the table and told her why I thought we could be useful and helpful in this process.”

When pressed on whether or not there were reservations about having O’Donoghue adapting the script herself, Jordan Smith said: “She’s a singular voice in so many ways and you don’t come across that all the time. For me, I never for one second question her ability to write, which a lot of producers, particularly who come from the network side, are apprehensive about book adapters writing their own work. For me, it was just so clear on the page that she was going to have those skills.”