‘The Rachel Incident’ Writer & Producers Talk About Changing TV

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

Speaking in Dublin House of news A group writing festival moderated by Morgan Hoffman, O’Donoghue told the Light House Cinema audience that failure is a big part of the process of developing your writing skills.

“My history as a writer is public because I have books on the shelves,” he said. “My history as a photographer is a mystery because it has already failed.”

The Irish author has written seven books, mostly in the YA space, where his best-selling novel Rachel’s experience it was his first book for adults.

“I have written many books that have failed and the reason I have done this is because I have only listened to what I want to write,” he said. “I really believe that you can’t write what’s happening, you can’t write everything that’s coming on TikTok. It will be dead in three days. You have to listen to yourself. And because I’ve done this, sometimes I write things that have worked and sometimes I haven’t and I don’t regret anything, because what I did is the same, which is fun.”

Rachel’s experience is set in Cork in 2010 and follows a student who works in a bookshop when she meets James, who is simple and insists on homosexuality. The two become friends and roommates, and when Rachel confesses that her professor has a crush on her, James helps her plan the launch of her new book in the store in hopes of wooing her later.

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

O’Donoghue admitted that he had already written “five or six” scripts but that adapting his work to TV was difficult. “Writing is a hard and lonely job, yes, but it’s also one where you hold the keys to everything.”

He continued: “Obviously these characters make sense to me. I’ve been with them for a long time, however, when you write a book, you don’t write it with eight episodes of forty-five minutes in mind, it’s advertising time. This is not the way we think about things. So, breaking this was important. One of the big things that happened is the change of the book and the change of the first book and the change of the first book. Her thoughts, so we only know what Rachel knows.”

In the series, O’Donoghue said, he felt it would be beneficial to have the other characters’ perspectives to see “everything that the relationship is.”

Jordan Smith, who directs Elliot Page’s Page Boy Productions recalled his first reading experience Rachel’s experience. “Personally, as a gay man, I have not been able to fully describe the role of women in my life and I have struggled to see it portrayed as vividly and beautifully as Caroline did in her book,” he said. Both are confusing, that’s true, but love is the greatest honor you can imagine.

“And Rachel in the book just screamed at me in a way I haven’t heard in a long time. It was so exciting. I knew everyone was going to follow the book – and they did. It was competitive. So, I just dug deep and put the deck together and found the opportunity to get in front of Caroline and just pour my heart out on the table and tell her why I thought we were useful.”

When pressed on whether or not O’Donoghue would change himself, Jordan Smith said: “It’s one word in many ways and you don’t come across that all the time. talent.”