Is it wrong to be delighted by your own writing? I found myself giggling the other night as I was editing one of my short stories. I heard myself and I felt a bit self-conscious, a bit self-congratulatory. So I paused and thought about it. What had me so tickled? Was it really about the words on the page? Here is the conclusion I came to.

It was not that I thought I was funny. There are people that I think are loads and loads funnier than I am. Rather, it was that I was delighted. I was delighted by the way that simply by obeying the discipline of doing the work, a story had shown up. I was delighted and entertained, as a reader, by that outcome. But I was not laughing at the content; instead I was feeling the emotion of having created something that before I began did not exist.

I was experiencing one of the great payoffs of doing the work.