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\n\tWriter Caroline O\u2019Donoghue and producers Matt Jordan Smith and Chelsea Morgan Hoffman took a break from filming upcoming series\u00a0The Rachel Incident\u00a0<\/em>to lift the lid on how the project came together and the challenges of adapting a book for the small screen.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tSpeaking at Dublin\u2019s Storyhouse screenwriting festival in a panel moderated by Morgan Hoffman, O\u2019Donoghue told an audience at the Light House Cinema that failure was a big part of the process of honing your screenwriting craft.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cMy history as a novelist is public because I have the novels there on the shelves,\u201d she said. \u201cMy history as a screenwriter is private because it has previously been a failure.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThe Irish author has written seven novels, mainly in the YA space, while her bestselling novel\u00a0The Rachel Incident\u00a0<\/em>was her first adult book.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cI 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,\u201d she said. \u201cI 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\u2019ve only ever done that, sometimes I have written things that have succeeded and sometimes I haven\u2019t and I don\u2019t regret any of it, because the experience of doing it is just the same, which is a joy.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThe Rachel Incident<\/em>\u00a0is 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThe series, which is currently in production for Channel 4, Universal Content Production and Element Pictures, stars M\u00e1ir\u00e9ad Tyers, Ellis Howard, Sarah Greene and Daniel Ings.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tO\u2019Donoghue admitted that she had written \u201cfive or six\u201d scripts beforehand but adapting her own work for TV was a different challenge. \u201cWriting novels is a difficult and lonely craft, yes, but it\u2019s also one where you hold the keys to everything.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tShe continued: \u201cObviously these characters are very clear to me. I\u2019ve been with them for a long time but nonetheless, when you have written a novel, you didn\u2019t write it with eight forty-five-minute-long episodes in mind, with ad breaks. That\u2019s 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.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tFor the series, O\u2019Donoghue said, she felt it would benefit to have the perspectives of all the other characters to see \u201cthe totality of what that relationship is.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tJordan Smith, who heads up Elliot Page\u2019s Page Boy Productions recalled his first impressions of reading\u00a0The Rachel Incident.<\/em>\u00a0\u201cPersonally, 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,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s both messy, which is true, but the deepest kind of love and respect you could possibly imagine.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cAnd 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 \u2013 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.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tWhen pressed on whether or not there were reservations about having O\u2019Donoghue adapting the script herself, Jordan Smith said: \u201cShe\u2019s a singular voice in so many ways and you don\u2019t 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.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n