You are about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about what goes into making one.

I'm Sadata Sese, an assistant commissioner of podcasts for BBC Sounds.

I pull a lot of levers to support a diverse range of podcasts on all sorts of subjects,

relationships, identity, comedy, even one that mixes poetry, music and inner city life.

So one day I'll be helping host develop their ideas, the next fact-checking, a feature,

and the next looking at how a podcast connects with its audience, and maybe that's you.

So if you like this podcast, check out some others on BBC Sounds.

BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts.

Hello, T.S. Eliot wrote in Little Gidding, last year's words belong to last year's language,

and next year's words await another voice. And to make an end is to make a beginning.

And never more than at New Year are we simultaneously focused on both an end to things and their beginning that's just what we're doing

on today's program looking at what makes a perfect opening to a story and how one should best be

ended now one of the rules of a good opening is not to overwhelm the reader or the listener

with too many details. So I'm going to give merely the briefest sketch of my guest's laundry

lists of achievements. Down the line from Washington, we have the novelist and memoirist and essayist

Amanata Fauna, OBE, and winner of the Wyndham Campbell Literature Prize. In the studio with me,

the novelist, short story writer and playwright Lucy Caldwell,

whose most recent novel these days won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.

And alongside her, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, screenwriter, children's author,

and the writer alongside Shakespeare of the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony. Welcome all of you to open book. Thank you. Thank you. So let's start as logic dictates, I suppose,

by thinking about beginnings. This might sound like a funny question, but do you all begin with

the beginning or is it something you only come to see clearly when you're

...