So on Monday, the new expansion to my 58keys YouTube channel starts with the first of at least six weekly writing workshop videos. I say at least six because I made half a dozen of them and will remake the ones I’ve thrown away.

And based on previous evidence, like four unbroken years of scripted videos every Wednesday, I’m going to continue much further than six weeks. Especially since I lost track of possible topics after existing viewers had suggested more than 100 of them.

But.

I’ve had to write these workshops in such a way as to make it possible for me to make them without feeling like a fraud. Not to mention a prat. I can point to thirty years — thirty years — of being a full-time, freelance writer but I can’t point to a good reason why you should listen to me rather than anyone else. It’s chiefly imposter syndrome, which I believed I’d surmounted by accepting that I am an imposter, let’s just ditch any doubt, but also my certainty that if I know something, I know you know it too. I know you know it already.

So I can entirely truthfully say that it never occurred to me to do these new 58keys Writing Workshop videos. It occurred to Steve Donoghue instead. We’ve talked a couple of times on his YouTube books channel — oh, get us, YouTubers talking to YouTubers, it’s either a cliché or meta — and he kept telling me off for not doing it.

I believe you have to hear something three times before it really registers and we went way behind that. But there was Steve in my ear and the reasonable certainty a few weeks ago that my 58keys channel would hit 10,000 subscribers. It has now, but even a few weeks ago I was confident that it eventually would, so I started this whole new project.

And fine, I am excited by it, I do like what I’ve made so far, but you’re here for the way I say I wrote around imposter syndrome. Please know that this took me a ludicrous number of weeks. But every workshop video has begun, will begin, will always have to begin with my saying a line that includes this:

“I’ll tell you how I write something, and then I need you to disagree with me in the comments.”

There. I may be talking my mouth off about writing, but in my head, I’ve just canceled that out and made this about you and me instead of about me and my deigning to dispense wisdom.

You and me. Maybe there is really is something I’ve learned about writing, because while I have no religion and no faith, I have certain intractable beliefs. One is that while my highest readership ever was a reach of three million people a week in Radio Times, writing is only and always one writer talking to one reader.

Hello.